fic: Podium (original) (raw)

Written for the 17daysinfeb challenge, but it doesn't really apply so I'm posting it here. Queen of AUs that I am, I actually stuck within canon in an effort to respond to an AU community. Yeah, I don't even know.

Anyway, 2263 words of StarGate:Atlantis gen fic with an Olympic theme.
Warnings: nothing they didn't do in the show, but I'd rate it teen or adult, since they did, after all, kill people in the show.

Bronze

Rodney blinked into the sunlight. That had been a spectacular explosion and after three years getting shot at, thrown into things, and tossed about by people, he considered himself a connoisseur of manhandling. His ears weren’t ringing, though. He blinked again. Sheppard looked down at him, upside down from his perspective, haloed by the afternoon sun.

“You alive?” Sheppard asked.

“Surely there are degrees of well being in your experience between alive and dead. There’s alive and uninjured, alive but severely injured, alive but fatally wounded—“

“He’s alive,” grumbled Ronan. Bits of dirt fell out of his hair as he stomped around. Teyla was at the edge of the clearing, her head tilted as she stared into the distance. Sheppard walked away and Rodney rolled to his knees. He had the grey brown dirt of this planet spread over both shoulders, in his hair and in lines along one leg. He’d probably find rocks in his Y fronts tonight. He sat up and brushed futilely at his pants.

“And the bronze for gymnastics goes to Rodney McKay of Canada.” Sheppard held one hand down to him.

“Bronze? That thing threw me from there to well, here.” Rodney took the offered hand and staggered to his feet.

“Sorry, Rodney, you’re only third best. The Russian judge screwed you on the technical points.”

“I’m never going to live down Siberia, am I?”

“Might want to work on the dismount. Ronan hit the ground and rolled. You kind of flopped.”

“Better than disqualifying. Is that the MALP?”

“Yeah, it’s toast.”

“See what I mean? Again with the lack of gradations. At the very least there’s functioning, non-functioning but salvageable, fit to be cannibalized, and utterly demolished.”

“Yeah, yeah, Rodney, there’s bread and toast and a slice of charcoal with a pat of butter.” Sheppard leaned over the burned out husk, as though he could tell anything about the condition of the circuitry by looking at it from two feet away. “And this is…?”

Rodney sighed. From the size of the explosion and the likelihood that the locals were using a nitrate based primitive explosive for their traps, he could guess from a distance. “It’s probably unsalvageable,” he admitted.

“Charcoal with schmear.”

Rodney stuck a finger in the smoking ruin of the MALP and drew it back, rubbing carbonization from his fingertips. The abused equipment barely had enough juice left to shock him. “Somewhat burned toast, but not completely ash.”

Sheppard hefted the strap of his P90 over one shoulder, “Rodney, we’re on a planet with natives who have one, shown a willingness to blow us up and two, shown a willingness to blow you up.”

“And?”

“Are you really going to argue that thing is salvageable? Let’s do what we came for and get home.”

The MALP spat out a shower of sparks and Rodney hastened to a safe distance. Sheppard stood there and smirked. Rodney patted down his pants, just to be sure an ember hadn’t caught a fold of cloth. “What?”

“Floor exercises?”

“Strategic evasion. Clearly I need to work on my form.”

“Or just tell the Russian judge to stuff it. Let’s make for the treeline. I don’t like the view here.”

Rodney shrugged his backpack to his shoulder. “I can see all the way up the hill.”

“That’s my point. Move.”

“From gymnastics to track?”

“You have breath for talking, Rodney. You aren’t moving fast enough.”

But Rodney was gasping when they made the cover of the trees. Ronon ghosted up, nodded at them both, and slipped away again while Rodney was wondering how badly he’d get teased if he checked his pulse. Not worth it. “You know, for all your scoffing, I’m in better shape now than I was three years ago. Granted not Olympic material, although curling requires less in the way of steroid-laden effort and values balance, judgment, patience, skill, planning.”

“Your kind of sport, right? No sweating and no one else understands it.”

He pulled out his most persuasive arguement. “They have an official scotch sponsor.”

“You know me, I’m a beer guy. Let’s go.” Sheppard reached a hand down to him, as he always did. Rodney batted it away, leaning against the tree instead, suddenly angry. He set a pace a bit faster than he should have, and was breathless again when they stepped between two trees and Ronan materialized in front of them.

“Teyla’s clearing the scouts. Two ahead, two by the site.”

“We’ll be quiet,” Sheppard said. Rodney tried to breathe silently, then gave it up as impossible after scrambling over the second log. Sheppard slid down a patch, then stopped to glance back at Rodney and Rodney saw his eyes widen before he felt the hand on his shoulder. He froze, one foot still raised to step over the rock in front of him, then kicked back, harder than he ever did in the gym, back and out, trying not to think about cartilage and ligaments snapping, only that he had to get away. He dove forward, bellyflopping to the dirt, and heard the report of Sheppard’s pistol before he could get his hands over his ears.

He rolled to one shoulder; the backpack yanked at his arm as it slid to the ground. He caught it in one hand and got his feet under him enough to push up and forward, back onto the path, behind Sheppard.

“Leave him. Let them know we’re serious too.”

Rodney dragged the strap of the pack back up to his shoulder, dislodging bracken and possibly insects along the way. He couldn’t bring himself to be nonchalant, not with a dead man behind him, not with months of defense training, not with the feel of the man’s knee cracking under his boot. He tried anyway. “Surely that was worth the gold.”

Sheppard still had his handgun out, but he smiled as he shook his head. “With that landing? Bronze again, maybe, but the other team failed to qualify. You do that without ending up with leaves in your hair, we’ll talk gold.”

“It’s not the Russian judge who’s the jerk.”

“Bronze is on the podium, Rodney. In the record books. Bronze is alive.”

The path opened up to the Ancient site and Rodney hurried forward.

Silver

It was a dumb idea and he knew it even when he first came up with it. Medals were for the military and besides diplomats had their own medals, like that Nobel thing, and how stupid does a backwoods boy have to be to think of gifting his commanding officer, even a civilian commanding officer, with a trinket like a Boy Scout pin. But the idea wouldn’t go away, and he traded the mini Hershey in his MRE for a shiny coin anyway, because he’d seen the way she stepped up to the gate, how she walked through to the Genii homeworld, and even if he didn’t know much else, the what and the why, not until later when the reports trickled out to the shared server and word spread about dirty nukes and McKay’s arrogance, he knew that she looked like a soldier and he thought maybe she was smart enough to get what he was trying to say. So he kept the kid’s coin and drilled a hole in the top and he tied it to a brightly colored ribbon from the Athosian harvest festival. A loop and a bow. Took him twice to get the ends lined up the way he wanted, perfectly even.

He couldn’t figure out how to do it, though. Sometimes he’d carry it in his pocket for a day, when he wasn’t scheduled for off-world, hoping that inspiration would hit him or that he’d get the balls to request an appointment or maybe he'd just catch her in the hall. She had a smile and a quiet word for everyone she met in the mess or at movie night, but he couldn’t figure out how to say, “I respect you” in the way his commanders told him. He hesitated through it all, through that first big fight in the city, and relocating to Cheyenne, and then re-relocating to Atlantis and months and months of running as fast as they could and then he didn’t have the option anymore. They didn’t bring her back.

Atlantis grieved, everyone in the city grieved, and he was no more than just a part of that, just one jarhead in a city of scientists and he pushed the silver coin with its flutter of ribbon under his shirts, ignored the hell out of it, angry with himself for a stupid idea, with Sheppard’s team for leaving her, with Dr. Weir for dying.

Then it didn’t matter anymore. He leaned against the bulkhead, the bump of the override under his palm. The hatch cracked once, twice and he felt himself being pulled toward the back of the jumper, a little to one side. The hatch door cracked open. He’d have thought it would make noise, that the air being pulled out along with his uniform, his boots, himself, would make a whoosh noise, like, well, like wind, but it was silent. The jumper hopped beneath him, probably Stackhouse trying to do something, pop the door or close the hatch, but that override was there for a reason and this was it. They were safe behind the pressurized divider and he was being pulled into space along with the air in the back of the jumper.

He slid back to the hatch, cracking his shoulder hard against it, and he felt a trickle of something, some liquid, spray up over his jaw. He looked away from the gaping, sagging hole, turned his face from the vacuum that was killing him and saw a spray of red against the wall, blood red, his blood, red as the Athosian ribbon on the coin tucked into his folded shirts. Then everything went black.

Gold

“Hey doc? Is she up for visitors?”

Keller glanced over to the bed, but she waited until Cooper blinked up at her and nodded before answering, “Not many. And not for long.” Lorne stepped forward to let Zelenka poke his head around the screen and Keller rolled the screen to the side. “She’s not entirely lucid, but –“

“She’s politely saying I’m stoned out of my gourd, Major. You’ll forgive me for not standing.” Cooper waved one hand, the plastic tubing of the iv dangling from her elbow.

Lorne grinned. “I’ll let it go this time, just don’t tell Sheppard. You know what a hard ass he is." She grinned at him, then her eyes crossed as she tried to focus on Zelenka, who was stepping forward to the other side of her bed. It took a moment to shift her focus and he waited patiently.

“In honor,” Zelenka said, “of your achievement in the sport of bobsled racing, the Atlantis Olympic Committee…” Lorne smirked and Keller snorted and at that Cooper lost it, her laughter floating over the morphine drip and the itchy pinch of the iv and the low red dull ache of her leg. Zelenka shot Lorne a look of tolerant amusement and continued, “is proud to present you with this gold medal, as your time was the fastest down that particular slope.” He held out something and she caught on a moment too late what he was trying to do. She raised her head and he slipped a knotted shoelace over it. She reached up to touch the paper folded around it, dragging the plastic cord of the fingertip bp monitor along the rail of the bed.

“So my condition at the finish line didn’t actually disqualify me?”

“Our rules are modified from the international standard so as to allow for creativity in the course,” Zelenka said as he pressed play on the mp3 player in his hand. The first notes of “Oh Canada” came forth and Lorne threw a salute and she reminded herself that she hadn’t cried when she was tumbling down the slope, jagged shards of ice slicing into her face and hands, and she hadn’t cried when the hardside case she’d been half riding and half ridden by had cracked open at the hinge when it and she hit the bottom of the mountain, one half spinning out and the other cracking under her hip and digging plastic splinters into her back. She hadn’t cried when she’d realized that the white showing through the tear in her pants wasn’t ice but bone, her bone, and so she was not going to cry now, safely in the infirmary, with a goldenrod origami circle on a shoelace around her neck and her nation’s anthem playing on a tinny speaker.

She sniffed. She could always blame the painkillers. They were really good ones.

“I’m privileged, gentlemen, to represent my country in these games. And in Atlantis.”

Keller stepped in to fuss with a machine, and said, “And that’s enough of that. You’ll have your team member back when she can walk again, and not a minute before. Shoo, both of you.” Lorne nodded and stepped back and Zelenka patted her hand and scooted after him.

Keller poked something that beeped and Cooper stared at the ceiling until her eyes were dry and when she blinked again, the lights were at the half dim they used for the night shift. She’d learned early not to try to curl onto her side, but she twisted at the waist to relieve the ache of lying too still for too long and the shoelace was looped over the hook that the saline bag hung from, the folded paper circle dangling at eye level.

Beta and encouragement by beadslut. Also, if anyone on my flist is into J2, she's posting a J2 AU in the 17daysinfeb community that I think is pretty good.