Word Count: 823
Rating: PG.
Category: Angst.
Story Status: Complete
Summary: It was a teddy bear.  Old and well loved...

 For the SGA_Flashfic Animals Challenge (that included a teddy bear section!) - sga_flashfic contains gen, ship and slash fics.

Beta: Thank you to Jayne Perry for the beta-reading.


Eddie Bear
By Leesa Perrie

It was a teddy bear.  Old and well loved.  Bare, the fur long ago worn away, and an eye and an ear both clumsily stitched back into place.  It wasn’t an expensive bear, even when it was new, and time had not treated it well.  Anyone else would have thrown it away; tattered round the edges, bare and stained, poorly patched, dusty and old.

But not him.  It was the one piece of sentimentality he allowed himself.  The one object from his childhood he kept, could not bear, he grimaced at the unintentional pun, to part with.  He even smuggled it into Atlantis, not wanting it known as his one personal item, and not wanting to be restrained by that asinine rule.  What if someone else’s item was bigger than his?  How would that be fair?  Fairer surely to have assigned each of them a box or a bag of a set size and allowed a person to fill it as he or she seemed fit.

So he’d smuggled it in, and hid it carefully.  If he died, no doubt it would be found when they, whoever they were, most likely his team, packed up his room.  He could imagine the surprise and the consternation that would cause, and smiled.  Let them all scratch their heads and wonder why he of all people would bring an old tattered teddy bear to a place like this.  Did he sleep with it still?  He knew some would snidely suggest that.  The answer though was no.  It had been many, many years since he had slept with his bear snuggled up in his arms.

If anyone was to ask him, not that he would still be around to do so, of course, but if anyone was to find out and he was still alive and able to answer, what would he tell them?  That it had belonged to someone he missed, perhaps?  Some long lost friend or family member, and he kept it as a reminder of them? 

Or the truth?

When he was four his Grandma gave him this bear.  He called it Eddie, Teddy being too common a name.  As if Eddie was any better, really.  He would later claim he named it after Thomas Edison, though he’d never heard of the guy when he was four.  He carried Eddie with him everywhere, until he started pre-school and wasn’t able to take his beloved bear with him.  But he carried Eddie everywhere outside of school.

He loved his bear, mostly because his Grandma had given it to him.  His beloved Grandma, who was the only one who truly seemed to love him for who he was and not what his parents wanted him to be.  Someone who died when he was six, and left him heartbroken for many years after.

Eddie became even more precious after that, but he learned not to carry his bear with him everywhere.  It only led to ridicule from his fair-weather friends, and his parents, or to traumas when the local bullies tried to take Eddie from him.  So Eddie stayed in his room, and he spent more and more time there, reading, studying and working out how things worked.

His parents had tried to get him to give Eddie to his sister, but he had hidden his bear away, saying he had lost it.  They brought her a new bear, a better and more expensive one.  He suspected they would have anyway, and were trying to make him ‘grow up’ or something.  To get rid of his much loved bear, which they deemed not to be a suitable toy for a child of eleven years old. 

But Eddie was his comfort when his parents argued.  When his dreams crashed down around him and he had to make new dreams.  When his sister was mean, or his so-called friends turned away from him, or even worse, turned against him.   When he found himself alone, and learned to like it, as alone was safer, easier and not hard to do.  He had a natural talent for alienating people, his mother had said, not realising that others had alienated him first.

This old, worn out teddy bear was stained by tears, his tears; a symbol of his childhood that had too few good times, too many bad.  A symbol of his survival in a world he didn’t fit into.  A symbol of the one person who had shown him unconditional love when he was small and needed it most.

He sighed, and placed Eddie back into the box, hiding his childhood away with his precious bear.

This was a new place, a new life.  And it seemed that there were people here who liked him, unconditionally. 

Eddie had served his purpose and for that he would be forever grateful to his Grandma for.  And he would allow himself this small bit of sentimentality, keep his old tattered bear and move on.

Rodney

The End

 

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