Unidentified, Part 2a

[fiercelydreamed]

Title: 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]

2.

The first thing John does the next morning is call Carson, and by 1:30 he and Rodney are walking into Cedars-Sinai Division of Neurology. "We're friends of Dr. Beckett, he's expecting us," he tells the receptionist with a smile, "second floor, third hall on the right?" and walks off before she can make them sign in. The elevator is spacious and quiet and takes its own sweet time doing anything. John glances over at Rodney, who's pale and tense.

"It's okay," John says. "It's Carson; he's not going to make you stay here." Rodney nods, jaw set, and John resolves to get him out of here within three hours whether or not Carson agrees. John doesn't usually take advantage of people, but Carson is their friend as well as a major name in the medical world. Today, he has no problems trading on both those roles at once.

They head down the wide, light-filled corridor, past glass doors embossed with names and credentials. Carson's going over a file at his desk, and he rises as John walks inside. "John," he says, clapping him on the shoulder, then turns a fond smile on Rodney, who's stopped halfway over the threshold.

"Rodney." He tugs Rodney into a firm hug, and Rodney's hands hover in mid-air for a moment before tentatively settling onto Carson's shoulders. He gives John a bewildered look; John smirks and shoves his own hands into his pockets, angry at himself. Twenty-four hours since he got Rodney's call, and he hasn't given him so much as a pat on the arm. Some fucking friend. "It's good to see you," Carson says as he pulls back. He waves them toward a couple of chairs and seats himself in the third, ignoring the armchair on the far side of his desk.

They talk for a while. Carson asks questions that walk the line between professional interest and friendly concern, keeping the conversation comfortable; John's always thought of Carson as being a little neurotic, but he's good at this. Rodney answers as best he can, gradually settling down as Carson shows no sign of wanting to admit him.

Eventually, Carson reaches over and snags a folder off his desk. "Let me tell you where things are at," he says, scanning through the pages. "Cottage Hospital was kind enough to fax me your chart. The good news is that there's no indication that you're in any physical danger. The bad news is--"

"--they don't know why I can't remember anything before Tuesday." Rodney's mouth pulls up at the corner as he tips his head toward John. "I got that song and dance before we left."

Carson sighs and flips the chart shut. "We've got some equipment here they don't have, but until we've had a chance to run you through it, I won't have a better idea of what's going on. I can tell you that with the most common causes of memory loss off the table, it's likely that real answers are going to take a while."

"So what's he supposed to do until then?" John cuts in, annoyed. It's unfair of him and he knows it, but he'd been secretly hoping that they'd come in and Carson would have the solution ready and waiting.

"Well, I'd like him to come in for some tests in the next couple of days," Carson says, "but there's absolutely no reason for him to stay here. My best medical advice? Pretend you're on vacation. Go see the sights."

"Excuse me?" Rodney says. It's confused instead of antagonistic, one more discrepancy to set John's teeth on edge.

Carson smiles ruefully and spreads his hand. "The truth is, brains are tricky things. Hard to predict, both fragile and resilient, and above all, highly adaptable. We're still trying to figure out how memory works, but what we do know is that what we call memory loss is often a question of access. If the path the brain uses to retrieve a group of memories is somehow damaged, given time it can often find a new way to get to them. Stimulation, especially from familiar places, could speed up that process."

"All right, then," John says, and gives them both a determined grin. "I guess we're playing tourist."


They spend the rest of the day roaming around Rodney's neighborhood on Wilshire, sticking their heads into corner stores and restaurants. It's not the most targeted way to start, particularly since Rodney usually has everything delivered to the condo, but it gives them something to do while John tries to remember every place in L.A. that Rodney's ever been. By the next morning he's got a pretty comprehensive list together, and during Rodney's EEG he kills time in the lobby re-sorting places by importance, familiarity, geographical region, like vs. dislike.

"Where to?" John asks as they get into the car afterward.

The look Rodney shoots him is amused and mildly skeptical. "You're really not much of a tour guide, are you?"

You have no idea, John thinks, and then clamps his jaw down just in time to stop himself from saying it.

Unfortunately, Rodney's not wrong. The next couple days aren't all bad; they have some good meals, visit some places that John genuinely likes and always forgets about: the California Science Center, the Griffith Observatory. They settle into each other's company. John gets used to the way his stomach twists when Rodney asks certain questions, or misses the in-jokes John keeps forgetting not to make, or passes up a chance to skewer the curator of the SKETCH Gallery for grossly oversimplifying relativity. Rodney starts getting used to the city, used to John, and John tries to get used to watching that happen.

But he's caught in the middle of a catch-22: if he doesn't want the constant sucker-punch of Rodney not remembering, he has to try and think of him as a stranger; if he wants Rodney to get his memory back (and he does, Jesus Christ), he has to call up every shared experience he can think of to try and trigger something. It's a tug-of-war that's got him working at cross-purposes, trying to tack in two directions at once, and what makes the whole thing harder is this: John hates L.A., and so does Rodney. It's smog-filled and sprawling, shrine to a million things neither of them give a shit about. How can he show him around, try to make this place familiar, without saying, "Oh, and by the way, you can't stand southern California or 98% of the people in it, you just live here because you needed a home base that was a known quantity and it took too much effort to leave"?

The more places they visit without the slightest glimmer of recognition from Rodney, the more the whole thing seems like an exercise in futility. By Wednesday they're mostly just driving around, John pointing out landmarks and giving lame explanations of their relevance. It's a relief to get a six-pack and a pizza and head back to the condo. They channel-surf and bond over being totally perplexed as to why anyone would ever watch this shit, and John tries not to think about why he's been sleeping on the futon since Saturday, borrowing towels and swinging home for clothes while Rodney's at Cedars-Sinai.

The SPECT scan on Thursday morning takes forever. When Rodney finally emerges from the back hallways, he looks shaky, worn down around the edges. "Look, the last few days have been really, uh, helpful," he says as he fumbles with the seatbelt, "I'm glad I've gotten to know the city a little, but I just spent an hour strapped down with a camera orbiting my head and something that's apparently radioactive running through my veins, and ..."

"Yeah, no problem." John turns the key in the ignition, his face weirdly cold. He doubts he could be worse at this if he tried. "I'll drop you off back at the condo."

"Oh," Rodney says, and tugs at the hem of his shirt. "Right, of course -- I'm sure there's a lot of stuff you need to be doing--"

Backing the car out of the parking space, John opens his mouth to agree and then catches the tone under Rodney's statement. "Not really," he says, carefully. "I've got a PS2 at my place, we could hook it up to your TV ..."

Relief flashes across Rodney's face, and he ducks his head a little too late to hide it. "Am I always this inconvenient?"

John smiles as he makes the right onto San Vicente. "Hard to say; I'm kind of used to it."

"Ah." Rodney laughs and rolls down the window, settling his arm along the edge. He lets his head tip backwards, eyes half-lidded against the sun. "I know things'll get better soon -- Carson'll figure something out, or I'll start remembering, or whatever, but this whole thing is still kind of overwhelming, and ... I don't know." His voice gets softer. "You're just a really comforting person to have around."

They drive in silence for a few blocks, and then Rodney turns his head. "What's a PS2?"


They spend the afternoon and most of the evening in front of Rodney's gigantic TV, laughing and swearing, controllers in hand. It's weird not to have Rodney mock his selection of games -- Pro Skater 4, for example, not to mention Final Fantasy -- and weirder still watching him play Vice City without using any of the cheat codes. His trash-talking, on the other hand, turns out to be innate, and his reflexes are as good as ever once he figures out the controller. It's the best day John has had all month.

They take a break around seven to rest their hands and order Thai food. Cracking his neck loudly, Rodney wanders around the room, idly scanning the shelves. "What are these?" he asks, pointing to a row of books and magazines set up in isolation, the shelves above and below it left deliberately empty.

John looks up from the takeout menu. "That's you -- stuff you've published." He walks over and grabs the February issue of the Journal of Mathematical Physics, flipping to the middle. "This is the newest."

Rodney scans the abstract, eyebrows drawing up as he does. He turns a page, then another, face fixed in a look of intense focus, and John's pulse speeds up, because of course, fuck, why have they been wasting time circumnavigating L.A.? This is Rodney's work, Rodney's life, if anything can help him remember then--

"I don't understand this," Rodney says.

It's like running head-first into a wall. "What?"

Rodney points at the journal. "This. It doesn't make any sense to me -- I mean, my name's at the top of the page, but I don't have the faintest idea what this is even about. All of these symbols, it's just -- gibberish." He looks up at John, brow furrowed.

John tries to smile, but the muscles of his face are stiff and uncooperative. "No big deal," he says, "it'll come back. Hey, I'm going to call for dinner, okay?"

As soon as he's on the balcony he fumbles his cell out of his pocket and calls Carson. "We have to get him into the hospital," he hisses as soon as the line picks up. "Now. Tonight."

"Slow down," Carson says, calm and very focused. "Tell me exactly what happened."

"He doesn't understand it!" John snaps. "His work -- I showed him the article he just published on computational flaws in Gordon's additions to gauge theory, and he said it was gibberish!"

There's the briefest pause. "It's all right. Don't worry about it."

John stares at the phone in disbelief. "What the hell are you talking about! It's his own work, and he doesn't fucking understand it--"

"John. There's no reason to think he would." John cuts off mid-sentence, and Carson sighs. "Look, there are different kinds of memory. Episodic memories are our record of things that happened to us; we've also got procedural memory, our memories of how to do things. We knew that whatever happened to Rodney affected his episodic memory but left his procedural memory intact, which is why he could do things like dial your number."

"Get to the point, Beckett," John says.

"There's a third kind of memory, semantic memory, that's linked to episodic -- it's our memory for facts. For people like you and Rodney, working on a proof may feel procedural -- like a thing you do -- but it's semantic memories that tell you how to do it. The psychiatrist at Cottage Hospital noted that Rodney's semantic memory had been compromised as well."

John rubs a hand over his eyes. "Great. Thanks for telling me."

"I'm worried about him, too," Carson says, gently, "but--"

"It's Rodney," John says. "It's the one thing -- if he can't do this anymore--" His free hand fists itself at his side.

"He will, John," Carson interrupts. "We don't know what caused the amnesia, but all the scans we've done so far suggest his brain is currently working fine. I'm hoping that his memory will return, but even if it doesn't, he's building new memories, and he's still as smart as he's ever been. He'll be able to learn everything again if he has to."

John swallows. "Okay."

After he hangs up with Carson, he leans his arms on the rail and lets his head drop forward, just breathing. Then he calls the restaurant.


Thursday morning, John's in the bathroom when Rodney exclaims, "Oh, shit, I knew I was forgetting -- shit."

"Wers hrung?" John calls, garbled around the toothbrush. He spits and strides out in the main room, wiping his mouth on his hand. "What's wrong? What is it?"

Rodney turns, eyes wide with consternation. "Where the hell is my wallet?"

He searches the apartment while John calls every police station between here and Santa Barbara; when neither attempt turns up anything, they dig through Rodney's filing cabinet and start phoning around to cancel cards and order new ones. John pretends to be Rodney for the first call, in case the service rep asks for information that's not listed on the account statements or Rodney's passport. When that one's done, Rodney motions for John to pass him the phone.

"You sure?" John asks, handing it over.

"It's been a week and a half," Rodney replies as he shuffles through the papers, "and while I suspect that I'm a terrible actor, it's about time I get used to playing the role of myself."

Before John can think of anything to say to that, his cell rings. He raises his eyebrows at Rodney, who jerks his chin in dismissal and starts dialing American Express. John ducks into the study. "Hello?"

"Hi, John -- I hope this isn't a bad time?" Weir says. She's got an unfailingly polite phone manner, which her employees know to fear rather than appreciate.

"What can I do for you, Elizabeth?"

"I'm truly sorry to bother you. As I didn't hear from you after Saturday, I assume you're still dealing with your family crisis," she says with sympathy and a slight hint of accusation. "But we've got a three-day booking with Bryan Singer tomorrow and Lorne's come down a bad case of food poisoning. I really need you back on for the weekend."

Shit. John pinches the skin between his eyebrows. Another of the things everyone at Copernicus Charters has learned is to pay very close attention to Weir's phrasing; if she doesn't state something in the form of a request, then it's not. She's unlikely to fire him for saying no, but the one and only time he's stumbled out of her good graces, she stuck him on a three-week press junket with Jessica Simpson. "Yeah, I can do it."

"Wonderful; I'm emailing you the itinerary," she says, keyboard clicking faintly in the background. "I really appreciate you being so flexible about this."

He grimaces. "No problem." Out in the main room, he can hear Rodney carefully reciting his address.

Leaning over the desk, he flips open Rodney's laptop and checks the itinerary. Five cities in three days, which means he won't have too much time on the ground to kill, but ... John paces around the room, running a hand through his hair, then takes a deep breath and walks out into the main room.

Rodney's on the couch with a bowl of cereal. John gestures toward the phone wedged between his ear and his shoulder. "You in the middle of something?"

"Depends," Rodney says through a mouthful of Count Chocula. "How long do you think the DMV's going to leave me on hold for?"

The side of John's mouth tugs upward. "Have you hit the half-hour mark yet?"

Rolling his eyes, Rodney thumbs the handset off and tosses it onto the couch cushion. "What's going on?"

John leans back against the bookcase. "My boss just called; I'm going to have to go in this weekend."

"Oh." Rodney swallows. He chases bits of cereal around the milk. "Okay."

"I'll be back Monday," John says, "but if you want, I could probably--"

Rodney shakes his head. "No, it's fine." He jiggles the spoon against the side of the bowl, staring out the sliding glass door as he thinks. "It's good, actually. It'll give me a chance to go through the rest of my stuff, you know, get my bearings." He points to the phone and smirks in a parody of enthusiasm. "That's if it doesn't take all seventy-two hours to get my driver's license replaced." Lifting a spoonful of cereal to his mouth, Rodney gets up and wanders over to the counter, where he scribbles a couple of notes on the to-do list they'd made and reaches for another stack of papers.

"Well. That's good, then," John says, blinking at the couch. "Good."


He leaves Rodney with a list of phone numbers and goes back to his apartment. All the dishes and laundry are exactly where he left them.

At 7 a.m. the next morning, he's in the air.

John's been piloting for Copernicus for seven years now, since a month and a half after he got back from Germany. He got the job because Weir booked a spot on one of Lost World's Joshua Tree meditation trips and spent the drive back in the passenger seat talking to Teyla. Teyla and John hadn't met yet, but she co-taught a free women’s self-defense course with Laura and happened to mention the encounter to her while they were cleaning up after class. Laura told Carson, who told Rodney, who told John, who told Rodney to go fuck himself, which Rodney interpreted as, "Yes, please, hack my computer, rewrite my resume and while you're at it, why don't you just forge my signature and fraudulently submit an application without telling me." The next morning, Weir called him, and before he'd woken up enough to hang up on her she said, "I'd love to have you come down for a test flight -- the 36A should be free today, how does two o'clock look for you?"

Twenty-four hours later, he had the job.

All things considered, he got lucky. Some of the clients are obnoxious, but it's not like John never had to deal with over-inflated assholes in the military. He knows how to take orders with a smile. In the last few years, Copernicus has gotten a name for itself, enough that when PAs call, they've been told which pilot to ask for. Ford gets the starlets and the party tours. Lorne gets the older women and the Christians. The clients who request John fall into one or both of two categories: the power players, and the men who value complete discretion.

It seems he has a reputation, though he doesn't really know how he acquired it. He wouldn't put it past Weir to trade on his history.

It doesn't matter. He gets to fly.

In late spring, L.A. to Chicago is a high bright daydream. Eight and a half miles of air lie between the wings of John's Learjet and the rumpled fabric of the continent below him, its crude patchwork of golds and greens. An apple dropped out the window would take four and a half minutes to reach the ground. In the stratosphere, numbers sing in John's head like a symphony: the soaring strings of the gracious tailwind, the solid gold horns of air parting around the wings, the thick timpani boom of turbulence. With his hands on the controls and the sun streaming through the windshield, John understands Newton, Einstein. He thinks he understands Icarus, climbing recklessly upward: joyful, burning, calling hallelujah as the wax melted away. Chasing last every second of it, even that final fall.

He loses something when the wheels touch down.


Late that night, he calls Rodney from a hotel room high above New York City. "Hey. How's it going?"

"You!" Rodney yells. "How could you not tell me we're at war?"

"Uh," John says.

"We are occupying a foreign country! And apparently doing an incredibly mediocre job of it, though the U.S. is really head of the class on how to antagonize the entire Muslim world, aren't they?"

John winces and moves the phone a little farther from his ear. "How much coffee have you had, McKay?"

"I don't know, keeping track sort of paled in importance next to, oh, let's see, global climate change -- what the hell have we been doing for the last fifty years?" There's a pause, then Rodney says, suspiciously, "How did you know I'd been drinking coffee, anyway?"

John rubs his eyes. "Lucky guess."

He spends the next hour listening to Rodney indignantly recap the last ten years, until he finally has to hang up and get some sleep. The next morning, he calls Teyla after Singer deplanes in Montreal. Ronon picks up.

"Sheppard."

"Hey, Dex. I need a favor."

"Uh huh."

"I need you to get McKay out of his condo."

"... Uh huh." He fits a world of skepticism in the sound.

John makes a few more notes in the log book as he runs through the post-flight. "I'm serious, Ronon, I think he's spent the last forty-eight hours going through the entire web archive of the New York Times. If he finds Wikipedia, his head's going to explode."

"What exactly am I supposed to do with him?"

"He's seen L.A., maybe take him out of the city for a few hours?"

Ronon grunts; John interprets the tone of it as moderate reluctance. "He doesn't know who I am, Sheppard. Don't you think that'll be kind of weird for him?"

"He's seen pictures, it'll be fine. I'll owe you one," John offers, already envisioning the bruises he's going to get when Ronon hands him his ass in the boxing ring. "Can I tell him you'll be calling?"

"Sure," Ronon says, and hangs up. John grins; he’s always appreciated the utilitarianism of a phone call with Dex. They’ve known each other for about six years now. They met when some high school kids decided to go cliff-jumping at La Jolla, high as helium balloons, and the third one hit the water head-first and didn’t come up for air. John had been one of the closest people out on the waves, and he got there first, but it was Ronon who’d dragged the kid up from the bottom and onto shore. "Nice," John had said afterwards, as the paramedics were driving away. Ronon had shrugged and said, "People are stupid," at which point John had felt compelled to buy him a drink.

Rodney's phone rings through to the machine, which John had more or less expected. Once he sinks his teeth into something -- in this case, the entirety of modern history -- he generally runs off caffeine and sheer mental momentum for upwards of thirty-six hours, then falls over and sleeps like the dead. "Hey, Rodney," John says, "I just talked to Ronon; he's gonna give you a call later. Uh, hopefully you'll be awake by then. Anyway, you guys should meet up or something." How are you, he thinks, are you doing okay, but those are questions reserved for ex-girlfriends and mothers. Instead, he settles for, "I promise the internet'll still be there when you get home."

He spends most of the day in a park, watching French Canadian teenagers ollie and kickflip off the fountain at the center; next time through here, he really has to bring his skateboard. His cell rings sometime in the afternoon. "This is Sheppard."

"Hi." It's Rodney, slow and a little sleepy. "What time is it where you are?"

John squints overhead. "Five-thirty, probably. I'm off until eight. Ronon call you?"

Rodney yawns. "Either that or someone put out the world's weirdest hit on me."

"What the hell?"

"No, I'm serious, you have to hear it to believe it." There's the whir and clatter of the answering machine being cued up, and then Ronon's deep voice says, "McKay. Dex. I'll pick you up tomorrow at eleven. Wear shorts." Click.

John bursts out laughing. "No, that's Ronon. He's always like that on the phone." He considers it for a moment. "In person, too, actually."

In the background, he hears Rodney slide the balcony door open, then wind and traffic noises. "Are you sure this is a good idea?" Rodney asks. "I know we're supposed to be friends and everything, but in the photos he looks kind of, um -- I just don't know what we'd have in common--"

"Hey." John hunkers forward on the bench, letting his voice drop a little. Jesus, the day Ronon Dex beats him out at emotional perceptiveness ... "Hey. You liked Carson, didn't you?"

"Yes, but--"

One of the skaters grinds the whole length of the handrail, a trick he's been blowing all afternoon. As soon as he lands it, his friends flock to him, slapping him on the back and crowing in triumph. "You like me, right?"

A few seconds pass. "Yes," Rodney says, very quietly.

John's throat feels dry. "Then trust me," he murmurs, watching the skaters laughing and gesturing in the afternoon sun. "It's going to be fine."

There's a slow exhale from the other end of the phone. "Okay," says Rodney.


There's a storm rolling east across the continent that night, which gives John an excuse to climb another few thousand feet higher for their late flight to Vancouver. At night, he imagines that his nerves run all the way to the Learjet's metal skin, that he can feel the cold fingers of light tracing her edges: the crisp shine of the moon and the Milky Way above, the faint splash of the lightning raging down in the troposphere. The cabin is quiet, and Bates, his second for this trip, has fallen asleep in the crew chair. John doesn't mind. He navigates the small hours of the night like a fish riding the broad black currents of the deep

He's back on the tarmac at eight the next morning with an on-site mechanic, checking out the source of a quarter-pitch rise he heard from the left turbojet during the descent. "Ah, a 60 -- that's got TFE731s, right?" the guy says, at which point John speed-dials Zelenka and spends the next six hours relaying messages between him and the so-called mechanic who can't tell a Pratt & Whitney from a Honeywell. Breakfast and lunch come out of a vending machine, but at least by the time Singer gets back, John's reasonably sure that no vital parts are going to come tumbling off at 40,000 feet.

In Seattle he orders from room service, turns the volume down on ESPN2, and calls Rodney.

"They're great," Rodney tells him, sounding amazed. "Teyla and Ronon -- you didn't tell me how great they were."

"Good day, huh?" John takes another bite of his burger.

"Oh, yeah. They took me rock climbing--"

And just like that, chewing turns to choking. It takes him a few seconds to get his breath back. "They what?"

"Well, Teyla asked what I wanted to do, and since my repertoire is still kind of, ah, limited, I asked what they usually did on their days off. So they took me to Malibu State Park and Ronon hooked a rope up -- by the way, and I'm assuming you know this, but I have seen spiders less comfortable on vertical surfaces then that guy is -- and they taught me how to climb. I pretty much sucked at it," he adds ruefully, "but, wow."

The one and only time John's seen Rodney anywhere near a climb was when the six of them took a day trip to Echo Cliffs back in 2002, to celebrate Teyla saving up enough capital to book Lost World's first international trip. Rodney wore a really stupid-looking hat and a thick layer of zinc oxide; he bitched about heat exhaustion and sun stroke right up until Teyla started lead-climbing the route, at which point he turned a really disturbing shade of greenish-white and didn't say anything for three hours beyond, "Oh my god, you people are insane." They never got him within fifteen feet of the wall itself.

"The heights didn't bother you?" John asks.

"Oh no, it was terrifying," Rodney says, "it took them twenty minutes to get me to take both feet off the ground, but it turns out that as long as you only look up, it gets marginally less frightening."

"Yeah." John still can't wrap his head around the image of Rodney on a rock-face, at least not without tacking an X-Files-style unmasking of the doppelganger at the end of it. "So I've heard."

Rodney describes the rest of his day in enthusiastic detail, and John sifts the tediousness of the morning for its better anecdotes, like the mechanic's failure to grasp the principle of righty-tighty-lefty-loosey. He's not really a phone person, but, like a lot of his rules, it doesn't apply to Rodney. John used to call him from the phone banks on base and say maybe five words in every two hundred; it didn't faze either of them. They've dialed each other's numbers in eleven countries and most of the lower forty-eight; somewhere along the way, he picked up the hang of talking back.

There's something about sprawling barefoot on a hotel bed, with the television flickering blue and yellow on the far wall and Rodney's voice close and constant, washing over him like a brook. He's probably spent as many nights in the last ten years like this as doing as anything else, which could be why it feels like home.


[Continue reading part 2 ...]