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It's August 30th, 2003. Rodney McKay is senior research scientist for SGC McMurdo. He is going to be heading the Atlantis Expedition and he is happy. Then John Sheppard sits in a chair and makes the universe light up around him. He is beautiful.
***
It's September 16th, 2013. John Sheppard is 47 years old and still beautiful. He's standing in front of a crowd. To his left, an electron is excited enough by the sudden flash of a camera light to trace the exact outline of Mickey Mouse before shooting up into the next orbital and for a brief second, momentarily transforming its molecule from simple oxygen to something much more complex. Rodney only has eyes for John.
Who has returned from another galaxy to tell Rodney, on national television, that he has cancer.
***
It's January 9th, 2004 and Rodney McKay is in love. John Sheppard is gasping Rodney's name as he lowers himself carefully, barely moving above Rodney as he pins him to the mattress, a look of such incredible pleasure on his face that Rodney thinks of this as that moment, the perfect moment when the universe should just pause, every atom of it, because this is the breaking point, the end of all expansion and it couldn't get any better from here.
***
It's September 20th, 2004, and Rodney McKay is convinced he's going to die, even though that never was, never will be a concern. John is flying them too fast, too close to the fiery ball of an alien sun. Except it isn't alien. Nothing can be alien, because nothing can be home either. Rodney thinks John is his home, thinks that there's no one he'd rather die beside, but that isn't true. Nine years later, Rodney will be on a stage, staring in John's resentful, resigned, dying eyes and he will feel more lost than he ever has before.
***
It's November 4th, 2004 and Rodney McKay is Chief Science Officer of the Atlantis Expedition and he has just unlocked the key to the universe, if only Dr. Weir would let him. He looks into John's eyes and makes a promise: trust me and I will make your dreams come true. John trusts him. He'll trust him even when he's dying from cancer a decade later.
They are on an alien planet, orbiting an alien sun, and Rodney can't control the awesome power that he was so desperate to wield. Sparks fly, the weapon won't stop firing. They are in for a catastrophic overload, and even if they make it out of the complex and towards the gate, the probability that they can escape the weapon's targeting sensors is minuscule.
Rodney doesn't stop. He doesn't think, he just dives for the reactor chamber and locks it behind him. John is pounding at the door, screaming his name. Their eyes meet and Dr. Manhattan becomes.
***
Two weeks later, a circulatory system appears on the surveillance footage in front of the facility.
***
After a month, a partially assembled skeleton, dressed in muscle, shocks a young lieutenant guarding the lab.
***
John is sitting alone in a puddlejumper just short of the gate when Rodney finally manifests his new form, three months after his component atoms scattered under a barrage of exotic particles. John is too drunk to understand the sheer magnitude of Rodney's brilliance, the way he has managed to recreate himself, how numerous lower beings have tried to tear him apart for his desire to "interfere" and how he has cast them away like mayflies.
"Rodney," John sobs, not caring that Rodney's skin glows blue, that his eyes no longer shine, that John will die long before Rodney can even contemplate his own survival, when time itself flutters around him like an ineffectual cloak against the oppressive chill of eternity. "I missed you."
***
Two years later and John is already getting older, the smile lines around his mouth already deepening into permanence. The Ori are massing in their home galaxy and the SGC demands that Rodney defend Earth, though it has long since ceased to be his home. Jack O'Neill had laughed as they torched the last of the Goa'uld, pumping bullet after bullet through their heads after Rodney had already demonstrated that he was perfectly capable of removing the symbiote and saving the host.
"That's the joke," O'Neill had said, "the joke is that I'm their savior and you're the man who makes them live with all the memories of the things they've done."
Rodney wants to tell Jack that's not the joke. The joke is that Rodney knows better than anyone about memories. The great truth of the universe is that everything happens simultaneously. He is standing over the dead body of what was once the Goa'uld Que'tesh talking with Jack O'Neill; he is twelve years old being told that he will never play the piano with any art; he is holding John Sheppard in his arms promising him that he will do anything for him even when he knows that three years later he is looking into the eyes of a young blonde woman across a meeting room, knowing that he wants her. Mere memory is luck by comparison to all that Rodney knows.
"What about the things you've done?" Rodney asks instead.
"Trick is to stop taking it all so seriously." O'Neill laughs. Of course he does: he's the Comedian.
***
Six years later and a Comedian is dead. Dex is still hiding behind his Wraith mask, even though Rodney can see what is beneath. Dex's features are perfectly symmetrical, his muscle mass more than proportional to his size and strength, his eyes are light and his skin never pale for all he hides it from the sun. A long time ago, Rodney would have known if he were beautiful, but now he's incapable of it. The last person Rodney knew to be beautiful was, and will always be, John Sheppard.
"Someone's killing masks," Ronon grunts. "I thought you should know."
"Kill me?" Rodney snorts. "I'm Rodney McKay."
"Or your girlfriend," he gestures to Jennifer, who still trembles a little in fear, like she doesn't share a bed with the most powerful man in the universe, like she wasn't trained by the SGC from a very young age to put her genius to good use, killing Wraith and "calming" riots.
But even as Rodney knows that weeks from now, Jennifer will be safe, he knows that she will no longer share his bed. Two more days and Jennifer will leave him, like Rodney left John, like John left the Milky Way to its fate.
"Besides," Rodney elaborates. "Why do you care? I thought you only wanted to go back to killing Wraith anyhow, never mind that Sheppard has them feeding out of the palm of his hand now anyway."
"Sheppard is in bed with the enemy. How long will they be his pets? This planet is rotting," Ronon admits, "Ascension temples, sitting in peace when people starve, when there are wars. And those that aren't doing nothing stink of sex and corruption. They brought me here to fight the bad things in this galaxy, when they themselves are the filth. You could still send me back."
***
It is October 9th, 2004 and Rodney McKay is hanging upside down from a tree, looking into a featureless mask. He commands the man to let him down, but Dex is his own Rorschach test, if you are afraid, you see a twisted, horrible face in the nothingness. If you are proud, you see a coward, afraid to be who he is in the world. Rodney McKay sees both.
***
January 1st, 2006, the Goa'uld have been defeated for good. Many of their followers have insisted on surrendering to Rodney personally.
"We'll, that was a disappointing little war," O'Neill says.
"Take me home," is all that Dex can demand, Teyla too. This is not their fight.
But Rodney knows the future. He is living it.
He blinks and he sees what could be if this universe's future did not occur all at once, if it were not predestined. He rarely glimpses into other worlds, for fear of what he might experience there, but should they return to Pegasus, he will not be able to protect them.
It's already enough that he can no longer protect John.
***
October 11th, 2013, the last day Rodney can see. Jennifer will have just rescued Dex from prison. Rodney will find her in her tight uniform with the yellow strips, hair not even a hint out of place, not even from the passionate kiss she has been sharing with Teyla.
It is not his place to stop her from taking solace in an old friend.
They will all be there, Dex, and Jennifer, and Teyla. Rodney too, will be with them before the end. O'Neill is dead and Jackson is still in a mental institution, Mitchell killed for his supposedly "unnatural proclivities," Hooded Justice disappeared a quickly as he had appeared once SG1 was disbanded, and the first Silk Spectre a disgraced aging physicist, whose daughter Rodney has convinced himself he loved. It's only John that's missing.
***
"You're future is here," Rodney replies.
"Screw your future, McKay," Dex steams. "You yourself claim to be more powerful than God."
"That's because there is no God."
"If you're so powerful, then change the future. If you don't, then you're no better than the Ancients."
"I cannot change the future," Rodney admits. Though on several occasions he has felt that he might, if the decisions were close enough, if he could defy all that he has and will be to nudge the course of time in one direction or another, when the other worlds seem almost palpable. This is not one of those times. "But I wouldn't expect you to understand. Your grasp of the present is tenuous enough as it is, let alone the future."
Dex snorts.
"You doubt my abilities, and yet you have come to ask me if I can tell you who killed O'Neill."
"So what if I have?"
"As much as I hate to say it: I don't know."
Dex stares at Rodney, his mask even more faceless than usual. Even Jennifer steps out of her bedroom retreat and into Rodney's workspace to marvel that there is something Rodney does not know.
"How is that possible?" she asks, looking frightened for once.
"Something is blocking my vision of the future. A flood of exotic particles, like the event that created me. You wouldn't understand."
"What could cause that?"
Rodney hesitates even as he knows that he will eventually tell them. He must. "All out war between the Ori and the Ancients."
"Surely, they wouldn't attack, with you on our side!"
"The Ori are growing in power, as are the Ancients. The temples to Ascension and the expansion of the Priors into parts of this galaxy have given them much more power than when the cold war between them began. It only takes one to break through, and tactics have never been my strength." Tactics had always been up to John.
"Bullshit, McKay," Ronon snarls. "You are the smartest and most powerful man in the universe. Thinking isn't the problem. Caring is."
If Rodney were still capable he would laugh. "Who was just saying that the planet is filth? Why not let someone a lot bigger play garbageman, hm? Or does the idea of having no one left to kill terrify you?"
"I'd be dead."
"If you're so worried about that, then take off the mask and find yourself a temple. It's not to late to Ascend and join that fight."
"Screw eternity. All I want is to kill the Wraith."
"Ascend and you can wipe them from existence. I could. Would that make you happy?"
Ronon growls. "You didn't when they were killing Sheppard by steps. You won't now."
"But would that be good enough?"
"No," Ronon admits.
"Then what would?"
"Send me back to Pegasus, McKay."
Ronon is gone in a flash, back to the filthy streets of this rotting planet, where he belongs.
***
July 3rd, 2007, Robert Kavanagh promises to replicate the experiment that killed the old Rodney McKay and made Doctor Manhattan. Three months later, no more is left of thousands than a handful of mismatched atoms. Five months later, Dr. Kavanagh is gunned down in his New York apartment.
O'Neill visits Rodney's bunker at Area 51. Jennifer is thankfully not present.
"You killed him," Rodney states.
"You could have stopped me."
"What he was doing is wrong. It can't work."
"Well, I'm glad there aren't a bunch of people like you running around. It'd be the Ori and the Ancients all over again."
"Another war you can't fight."
O'Neill laughs. "There's that. Have to content myself with assassinations these days. But could it work? Could we all become gods and continue this there?"
"I don't think so. The exotic particles that created me were inherently unpredictable. Kavanagh could recreate the conditions all he wanted, but there's no way to make particles that are inherently uncontainable do exactly what you need. And even if the conditions were just right, it is unlikely that any of those wanting to take the crash-diet approach to godliness will have the requisite intelligence to rebuild themselves molecule for molecule, nor even comprehend the universe the way I do."
"Modest as always, Doc. Speaking of indignities, how's Jennifer?"
***
It's October 5th, 2013 and Rodney and Jennifer are making love. Rodney remembers once, how it was to be hungry for touch.
***
It is July 4th, 2004 and John is whimpering, begging. "God, Rodney, your hands feel so good. Like that. I love the way you touch me."
***
Hands. There are a hundred Jennifers. He is making love to all of them at once. She enjoys his fingers in her hair. She loves soft, soothing touches. Her nipples are delicate, too sensitive for biting. He knows it all at once. Just as he knows how she reacts when he splits himself. He wants her to see - making love to so many Rodneys, loving them all at once, in a bundle of simultaneous, if limited experience. He has touched her everywhere and now, she is pushing him away.
"What the hell, Rodney?"
"I wanted to make you happy."
"Well, that's not the way to go about it. I know you're not a normal man, but sometimes is it too much to ask that you let me feel normal sometimes?"
"It's not too much to ask."
"But it's more than you can give. Rodney, you're slipping away." She holds her hand out to him. There are many hims. He and Jennifer are making love. Does it matter that this was the last time?
He is making love to John. He is kissing April Bingham behind their six grade classroom. He is on Mars and Jennifer is with Teyla. He isn't slipping away. He is away already and alway has been.
***
February 8th, 2008, Rodney wears a black suit. He'll wear one when O'Neill dies as well. This time, it is John's father who has died and Jennifer has insisted that they pay their respects.
John's eyes are dry and Rodney wonders if there should be tears. He thinks there should, but it is difficult to know why. Rodney has not cried for a long time.
John is young still, exactly as he appeared the day they first made love. It is the Wraith's doing, Rodney knows, the one John keeps as companion and experiment, both. The one who first fed off him. The illusion of youth is perfect, down to the exact depth of his wrinkle lines.
Rodney watches as John approaches an animal - a horse, which Rodney would not consent to ride even now that broken bones are no longer a consideration. But John reaches out to it, patting its nose and speaking, as though it could understand, before climbing up onto the fence and sliding onto its back, with no saddle and a black suit his only protection. John is still fragile. They are in the desert and John is flying through the air, hit by a Wraith. In another world, John dies alone in a different desert. The Wraith stares at John hungrily and is feeding. John is sick and losing his memory. John is crash landing a hive ship. He is dying of cancer.
"Your father is dead," Rodney states, gliding smoothly at John's side.
"Yeah, sometimes that happens." With the burgeoning temples of Ascension, death in the old sense is becoming obsolete. And with the sudden-death machine to accelerate the process John himself discovered, it is getting easier each day.
"You aren't sad?"
"Jesus, Rodney, he was my father. You weren't good at this stuff when you were alive, you're not good at it now. Just leave me alone."
"I'm still alive, John." John nudges his horse faster, but it's not hard for Rodney to keep up. "I didn't die."
"No, you didn't. But you're different."
"Things change. It's only the limits on human imagination the keep you thinking that you are static."
"But you are static - you know what's going to happen before it happens. You're frozen at every moment at once, how is that changing?"
"I made a change."
"Yeah, you left me. That's pretty much it."
"I'm sorry."
"Sure you are."
He doesn't want to discuss the reasons why he left. It wasn't lust, because he is far beyond the physical now. It was fear, which seems so strange an emotion when he already knows the future. John is finite and Rodney is infinite. John's life will end. John's concerns are of this world when Rodney's move beyond it into the very structure of things. So what if they brush up against each other for a brief instant? Even if John gives Rodney everything, his whole life, it will never be enough. John is right, Rodney is static and unchanging. He is everywhere at once and John is a fraction of infinity, a number rapidly approaching nothing at all.
"So, what will you do now?" Rodney changes the subject.
"Dad traded on my reputation. He created an empire of characters. He's made me into some kind of comic book hero. The Shepherd and his trusty sidekick, Todd. There are action figures."
"You are a hero." John is flying a nuclear bomb Rodney created into a hive ship. He is killing sixty Genii singlehandedly. He is pleading with Dr. Weir to go back and rescue a Colonel who only bothered with him enough to scorn.
John laughs. Rodney remembers enough to know that it is bitter. "I'm not as heroic as you think. Do you know we even have a perfume? I guess it's time to take my name into my own hands, at least. Use all that money for something good."
"What good is it?" To Rodney, money is invisible. He sees goods and services change hands around the globe. He sees piles of gold and the sweat of laborers, but these things seem to arise organically, like the rushing about of blood cells through the giant traffic network of the body. He could stop it all in an instant. He could snap his fingers and the whole world and its madness would end without thought. But he doesn't, because what would be the point? He'd no sooner eradicate a colony of bees, now that they can no longer sting him.
John laughs. "Good enough to get things done here, at least."
"What will you use it for?" John's life is in Pegasus, and money can do nothing there.
"Ascension."
"I thought you didn't believe in that."
"So what if I don't?"
***
The time barrier is easy to crack. Rodney peels it aside like the skin off an orange. He's here and he's there. He's everywhere at once.
"Took you long enough," John says when Rodney appears beside him, mirroring his cross-legged pose.
To Rodney it has been no time at all. He'd come as soon as Zelenka sent word. He could have come sooner, if presupposing those kinds of events didn't put such a strain on the realities. Rodney tries not to think about them, but he knows they are not founded on infinite energy. One cannot deviate too far from that which is. Sadly, it is not much different than Doc Brown's hole in the space-time continuum, for all its bad science.
"I'm not omniscient, you know."
John laughs. "Then you really would be God."
"Then I wouldn't need to exist at all." That's all the mystery left to it. When Rodney knows what will be and what is at once, the only reason to suffer the weight of action in this world is the knowledge that what he does will send ripples through the world that he will never experience or see. If he saw everything, he'd be everything and then he'd have no reason to act. He'd simply know.
"You're a being that transcends space and time and you still want to say God is dead." Three years from now, John will accuse Rodney of being dead.
Rodney shrugs. "Once an atheist, always an atheist."
John's laughter is sweet. Rodney watches the sound waves - they fly through the air like birds to land on Rodney's outstretched hand. He leans over to cup John's cheek.
"Sorry for the beard," John blushes.
He no longer feels with his fingers, but with all of his intellect. He forgets how it was to feel John's skin on his palm. But he smooths the hair away anyhow. "Closest shave you'll ever have." Right down to the last atom.
John feels his own cheek and smiles. "If I requisitioned you as personal razor, do you think the IOA'd let you stay here?"
"The IOA is made up of a bunch of idiots. They couldn't even build an oxygen molecule."
"Um, I don't think many of us could, buddy."
Rodney nods. In two minutes, John will kiss him. Rodney will enfold them in a shimmering opaque shield as they make love. He still won't be able to feel John's skin on his, but he'll moan anyway, recalling what he once felt.
"I'm sorry," he says. "Sometimes I forgot that everyone isn't a genius."
"That's one way to put it."
"So, did you learn anything here?"
John shrugs. "I know the exact shape of every stain on this meditation mat."
"So you wouldn't stay here?" Rodney peeks into another reality for just a moment, where he never comes, and John kisses a beautiful woman. They have a child together. The woman and the child ascend. Only when John is alone once more does Rodney come for him. John passes away and Rodney spends an eternity chasing a single atom from sun to sun.
John snorts. "You think I have a chance at Ascension? I can barely sit still for five minutes."
"You're a good man," Rodney replies. The number of Ascended who got into the club by petty acts of heroism is ridiculous in and of itself. Hell, they'll even let Daniel Jackson in, if only when the world is about to end.
"I don't want forever."
'But I'm forever,' Rodney wants to say. In every other reality he glimpses, he watches John Sheppard die. Perhaps that's why he sticks with this one, where something obscures his vision.
"You said it yourself, Rodney, it gets harder and harder to act when your understanding is so vast that you experience the consequences of those actions immediately. Who's to know that you even experience them? Maybe you just imagine them. I may be just a stupid mortal to you, and to them, but I don't want to know everything. I don't want to die just because I finally stop caring."
"You always were the happy idiot," Rodney replies, even though a part of him, he thinks, is feeling sadness. Even if the future extends beyond October 11th, 2013, John will still want to die and leave Rodney alone. There is nothing that can change that.
***
December 3rd, 2005, Acastus Kolya has John tied to a chair in a bunker a good mile underground. Rodney McKay is supposed to be in the Milky Way guarding Earth against Ori invasion. What the Ori don't know can't hurt them. Instead he is standing in the Atlantis gateroom.
"And if our dear Dr. Manhattan (is that what Dr. McKay is going by now?) should even think about rescuing him, then the device we have designed to detect his specific kind of energy signature will trigger this whole building to explode."
The whole idea is preposterous, of course. Kolya is too damn dumb to realize that Rodney needs less than a millisecond, less than a billionth of a millisecond, to disarm the mechanism, or simply transport John out of there, leaving Kolya to die.
He looks into John's eyes, looks at the Wraith who is snarling next to him. John is already dying by inches. He refuses to Ascend, that much Rodney knows. He rescues John now, he keeps rescuing John. The Wraith are destroyed, Atlantis is cleansed of all dangerous technology, the replicators, and the strange Asgard tribe are gone with the snap of a finger. John gets quieter, he gets older, the fight goes out of his eyes. He looks at Rodney with resentment. Earth is destroyed by the Ori, while John and Rodney live together in Pegasus. Rodney has stopped caring, but John still does. He takes his life while Rodney is back in the Milky Way surveying the damage. Rodney lives out an eternity watching molecules speed through empty space, observing the birth of galaxies, fascinated by the wonder that is the life immortal.
He does nothing and the future is uncertain. On the last day he knows, John is still alive, looking just as young as the day they met thanks to the Wraith. Rodney is with Jennifer, but the unknown, at least, still holds pull, even against John's muffled cries. Rodney is and will always be a scientist.
Later, when John lies curled up against him, demanding to know why Rodney did nothing, Rodney will smooth back his hair, kiss his temple and tell him that there was nothing to be done. Kolya is dead, all the machines that can detect Rodney's presence and the research, destroyed. Rodney tells John that he will always love him, that he will always protect him, even when he knows that he will meet Jennifer days later.
No matter what John says, he doesn't want to be protected.
***
October 11th, 2013. Rodney and Jennifer observe the wonder that is elements, winds, and sands and time, blowing over the harsh Mars landscape.
"You are going to ask me to destroy the Ori." She has asked, she will ask, but every time, Rodney preempts her. There is not a time when she says it on her own. He cannot remember such a world. It is as close to human understanding as he can come to know what will be said, if not due to any form of insight.
"I am going to ask you to stop them."
"Why?"
"What do you mean, why? They're going to kill us and everyone in this galaxy or make us convert to Origin."
"Then convert to Origin, if you do not wish to die yet. You will all die eventually." Rodney and the Ori have more in common than Rodney and Jennifer now. She cannot possibly comprehend the things that concern those unencumbered by time. "When the sun turns from supernova to black hole, every atom of you and every atom of everyone else on this world will end up in the same place, whether you are converted back to simple carbon on the altar of Origin or not."
"Do you want me to die?" Jennifer begs. "Do you want me to burn?"
Rodney cups her cheek, evaporating the tears from her eyes so he does not have to see them. "I'm not a monster," he tries to sound insulted, when he would not blame her for thinking that he is. "I don't want you to suffer."
"But you don't want me to live either."
To Rodney, Jennifer's life is an ephemeral thing, as is their love. He is glad to have had it, in the vast repository of his experience, but a day, a year, a decade, they lose meaning in the grand scheme of things. "I will take you back with me to Pegasus, then."
"But what about all the other billions of people?! What about all the people who won't get a future if the Ori destroy the planet? What about their lives?! Maybe a life is nothing to you, but to us, life is valuable. It's worth experiencing!"
"The Ori will experience more than the entire scope of humanity will ever know. Why should I destroy them for morons I don't even know?"
She throws a punch then, but Rodney is not actually solid. His consciousness projects light that shows his form and he manipulates gravity to create movement, or electrical fields to build the illusion of touch. He has no body at all. "Because you care about those morons! Where's your compassion, Rodney? You were human, once!"
It's funny, how lack of compassion doesn't concern Rodney. In fact he is too compassionate. Life is complex. It is more complex than anything he ever learned as a physicist. Its beauty is painted in eons, in small evolutions from time to time, that allow the collection of atoms that are Jennifer to be brought to this point in time, fighting against entropy and genetic inheritance and circumstance to be here with Rodney, pleading for the lives of an entire galaxy. But life has many forms, all of whom struggle against each other, some surviving and others dying out to create each individual moment, this symphony of complexity and wonder. No one is better than another. Look into the future hard enough and good and evil will disappear. Compassion is to feel for the single-celled organisms that die by a small shiver in the tide. Compassion is to watch the shifting of some far-off primordial ooze and cheer for it to produce the first organized chains of proteins that will eventually be life. Compassion is to value the vulture and the dung beetle and the Wraith for the lives they lead, no mater how brief or how unseemly.
Jennifer finally calms herself, forcing her breathing to slow and her heartbeat to approach a regular rhythm for humans. "They'll destroy the Ancients. Then they'll destroy Earth. Then they'll move on to Pegasus and everywhere life exists."
"Life is not the only beautiful, complex thing in this universe."
"Damnit, Rodney! If you ever loved me. If you ever loved anyone, how can you say that you'd take your stupid mars rocks and oxygen molecules over every conscious living being in the universe?!"
There is a future where Rodney does intervene. The Ori are powerful, but still no match for Rodney, who moves in the sea of zero point energy in this reality and all others, while the Ori are limited to the faith in this galaxy. He watches. He waits, but then there is nothing left to do, nothing left to care about. John dies, Jennifer and Teyla grow old together. They raise a son. That son has a son and that son has two daughters, who have daughters and sons. Rodney soon tires of watching them. All human lives blend together, and its hard to remember that they aren't all just Torren. They all seem the same. Rodney eventually stops watching. The SGC fights more wars. A new Comedian is born from the ashes of the old. More and more people Ascend until there are none left. Rodney meets them on the planes of eternity as they fade into the background, with no one left to intervene for. They watch the same phenomena. They spend all of time watching the universe slowly unfold, until they are all alike, thought-forms so steeped in inertia that they might as well be the same, might as well not exist at all. The end is like the beginning. The other wars fought in the future are the same as the past. Consciousness becomes meaningless, as Rodney lives more and more in one instant, where he presupposes the future and knows the past. If he doesn't act, then he need not even remember to play his part in the comedy of time. What little consciousness he has left wonders if there will be an end. He welcomes it, until apathy drowns him and all that is left is the time where he intervened and fought and loved, and that is not enough.
"No," he says. He welcomes the unknown, longs for it even.
***
The future is exciting. How could Rodney have forgotten this? The Castle of Celestis is burning, the temples are empty. The churches, the synagogues are silent. In Pegasus, the great citadels carved into mountains, far from the reach of the Wraith, are filled, but with refugees rather than worshippers.
Down in the streets, photos of the Comedian and the Night Owl, and even John, The Shepherd, burn. Without faith the world has no more need for heros.
Teyla stands in the snow surrounding the Antarctic outpost, weeping openly. She had believed in the Ancestors, even after all the things she'd seen in the Goa'uld war, she'd believed that there were deities capable of good.
Ten years ago, John Sheppard sits in a chair deep beneath the same spot and changes the world.
John is standing behind Teyla now, a hand placed awkwardly on her shoulder. He, too, is pulling away from humanity and Rodney is astonished at how long it has taken to notice it. Rodney does not know what will happen, the particles from the war cascade through time and space. He may be confined to the past and present in this sector of space for eons.
"Did I ever tell you the story of Ozymandias?" John asks. He asked so many similar questions that first year, when Earth and all its traditions had been new to Teyla, before she took it upon herself to wear the mantel of an Earth symbol worn by Jonas Quinn, another alien, ultimately unable to serve a planet not his own.
"No," Teyla chokes out. Rodney supposes she feels bereft, as do many, but John was right, they are all better without faith anyhow. Truth, Rodney has come to see, is the most beautiful thing of all. John was right to use the subspace resonance weapon they had been working on to transmit the energy from the Ark of Truth throughout the galaxy. It has shown everyone the truth, about Origin, about gods. In another reality, it is Daniel Jackson, never having bothered to wear a mask, who turns it on, destroying the Ori and thier Orici, who in this reality is never born.
"Ozymandias was an old Egyptian king. Well, a Goa'uld too. He built great statues and monuments proclaiming that he was 'king of kings' and that all should look upon his power and despair. But when we expelled the Goa'uld from Earth, the statues crumbled, abandoned by time. But we don't cry about it, Teyla. Please don't cry. That's victory, don't you see? He was a despot and he was expelled, why shouldn't his empire be left in ruin?"
"And what if people had chosen to believe in him voluntarily? Our faith was not yours to take away."
John laughs. "Your faith was going to lead to a war that would take this entire plane of existence down with it. The Ori needed to be stopped. The Ancients, President Bush, those of us who were nothing more than masked vigilantes. Don't you see, Teyla? Without faith, we are free to organize the world how it should be. War will no longer be necessary. We'll be free to finally live our lives for something other than the cause. Aren't you tired of it?"
"And the Wraith?" Dex growls. "They want to eat us, not fight a religious war."
John laughs, gesturing to the solitary figure in a black cloak making his way out to them across the snow without a single shiver. "The truth, as my good friend, Todd, can attest to, is that the Wraith have a better chance of increasing their numbers and living longer lives if they agree to the gene therapy. It was only the belief that it is somehow less noble to not hunt your prey that was stopping them."
"You never hated them. You admire them," Dex accuses. He's right, of course. Since they escaped the Genii bunker, John and Todd have been nearly inseparable.
"Aside from their dietary requirements, what's not to admire? We aren't that different. No species is that different. We're all just fighting to survive. Space is big and with unlimited power, courtesy of Rodney's ZPMs, there isn't a reason to keep fighting."
Dex is quick to pull his weapon, aiming it at the Wraith as it approaches, but then he stops, a sudden fear filling his eyes. "You're telling the truth."
Rodney can feel it now, the way the light from the Ark permeates reality, humming over his being like a thousand eskimo kisses.
John grins. "I'm telling the truth."
"But that doesn't make it right!" Teyla shouts, going at John with her Bantos sticks. But he at least holds his own.
"What can be wrong about universal peace?"
"It is peace without hope. Peace without a soul." Except she can't believe in a soul anymore. A consciousness, perhaps. Immortality is easy, but to believe that it has any more meaning than that has always been irrational. The idea that there are good and bad and worthy things has always been absurd. The elements in the Martian sands are beautiful, as are the insects that decompose the rot of this world, as are the Wraith who live eons trapped by the limitations of flesh.
The truth is that Rodney is tired of humans and their petty concerns about good and bad, war and peace. Should they die, as all things do in good time, the stars will keep burning, the elements will keep shifting. And Rodney will appreciate their short lives for what they are.
With a flash he and John are on Mars, stepping into the great crystal cathedral he had built for Jennifer. John himself seems unimpressed.
"Morons," Rodney complains.
John moves to sit, and a chair of crystal builds itself beneath him. Rodney barely has to think about it. Taking care of John is an old habit. "I think you should send Ronon back to Pegasus. It'll be good for him to see the Wraith alliance in person. Teyla too."
"She's with Jennifer now."
"Then maybe not." John stands again. He is restless now, Rodney can tell. The unfamiliar feeling of anticipation is killing him, not knowing the reason for John's tension. "That doesn't bother you?"
"Remember what Spock said? All good things must come to an end."
"Except for you. You don't end." John is agitated now, shaking with it the way he didn't when he brought peace to this small corner of the universe.
"No."
"So you're just done with Jennifer? It doesn't matter that she left you?"
"I always knew she was going to leave me."
"Then why bother?" John shouts. "Why bother doing anything at all if you already know how it's gonna end?"
"I don't understand." Rodney only understands that even after all this time it still hurts him to see John so upset. "I've always been petty, arrogant, and bad with people. That hasn't changed. I wish. I know it's silly, but I wish that knowing everything I know could change that. I don't want you to be angry at me."
"Jesus Christ, Rodney. Of course I'm angry at you. You left me. Without a word you just up and left me, after you'd promised me that we'd take on the future together. You knew that you'd leave me and you still lied."
Rodney has forgotten how to cry. He's forgotten how to get angry, too, but he thinks that if things were how they were before he became Dr. Manhattan, he would be crying now. "Every future I looked into, except for this one, where the exotic particles block my vision of the future, in every universe, you die and you leave me alone."
"So you thought you'd leave me first?" John asks, standing close to Rodney now. If Rodney had a true body, he would feel John's breath on his cheek, but instead he just feels the atoms in the air in front of John humming, basking in John's presence the same way Rodney does.
"No," Rodney reaches out, cupping John's cheek. "I glimpsed so many worlds and I chose the one where I didn't know. I chose to believe that sometime in the unknown future you'd change your mind about Ascension."
John laughs. "Well, there's no chance of that now. The exotic particles released when I created a rift to carry the light from the Ark of Truth are deadly to Ascended beings. Plan B, if the Ark didn't work."
"And now you're dying of cancer."
"I'm not dying of cancer, Rodney. I just said that so you'd stay out of my way and let me implement my plan."
"Oh. I'm the smartest being in the universe. I probably should have seen that. Then again, I've always been easily persuaded by you."
"Always?" John is leaning forward now, close enough to kiss. Rodney takes every molecule of him in, every atom, even when he longs for a human body to press up against John's and truly feel.
"What now?" Rodney whispers.
"What do you want?"
"I want you to be with me. I don't want you to die. In the other futures, you die and I fade away. I watch and I watch until action become so foreign to me that I don't bother. I think there are others. There must be others like me, because even if my accident was very rare, on the scale of infinite time and infinite space, its not that unlikely. They're out there, watching, maybe moving a proton or two to make a beautiful pattern, or birth a star, but they might as well not exist. They might as well be part of the background of the universe itself for all they do. Without you, that's what happens to me, every time."
John leans forward then, pressing his lips against the field that Rodney has created to serve as the illusion of touch. "There is no war, no Ori threat to keep you in this galaxy or me in Pegasus. We're free now to just live our lives. Live yours with me, and when I die, fade into the background." Sometimes Rodney wonders if its inevitable, that though he is not ruled by entropy it will make its way into his existence in the form of apathy.
"But John," Rodney whimpers into the warmth of John's lips, the sound arising from all around, Mars weeping with him.
"You said it yourself, Rodney, all good things must come to an end."
"But I hoped--"
"I put an end to hope. Remember?"
***
It is January 16th, 2015 and the second year of the Wraith-Human annual alliance celebration. Rodney takes John out to the west pier and walks with him over the water to the middle of a darkened sea, the stars above them and reflected in the water around them. He turns the water solid, like a bed of satin where he lays John down to make love to him. John is still beautiful.
***
It's May 4th, 2020 and the Earth is at peace, a world government finally established and the energy network up and running to serve all equally. John and Rodney ride a ferris wheel at a county fair in a quiet town in Iowa. Teyla has just given birth to her and Jennifer's second child, and Rodney is tired from the repeated attempts to convince him to transport the baby from Teyla's belly instead of making her push it out.
"Maybe, if you had a child, after you died, I could stick around a little longer."
John kisses him quiet that night, even though Rodney manifests a second body to keep speaking as John tries to seduce the first one. "Seriously, I think I could even come up with a way for you to carry it, if you'd like."
"No way, Rodney."
***
It's July 30th, 2029 and John and Rodney are on an unnamed planet in the Pegasus Galaxy.
"I wish you could see the universe as I see it," Rodney says, touch his fingers to John's forehead
***
It's August 9th, 2035 and they're back on Earth for a football game, though John must admit that its a little less fun without all the fanatics.
"Rodney, why in the hell are you rooting for the Cowboys?"
"Because they're blue. An number 23 creates a wake in the air that looks like a crocodile when he travels at exactly 15.276 miles per hour."
"It's as good a reason as any," John admits.
***
It's November 23rd, 2041 and they run into unexpected life in the middle of the void.
***
It's December 4th, 2073 and John lets Todd give him more and more years, making frantic love to Rodney afterwards.
***
It's October 30th, 2201 and the exotic particles that block Rodney's vision of the future are finally starting to deteriorate. He receives enough in flashes to know that as promised, all good things will end.
"I love you," John says. He says it a thousand times at once. A thousand different Rodneys reply. "I love you too." They all mean it.
***
It's April 19th, 2338 and Rodney watches John's body spontaneously combust where he's laid it on the surface of the sun. He follows each atom as they split apart. One travels down towards the core, tracing beautiful fractal strands of chaos as it goes.
***
It's December 4th, 3125 and the galaxy is peaceful and silent.