Word Count:
694
Rating:
PG
Category:
Angst
Story Status:
Complete
Summary:
Rodney is glad when Rod goes home, but the nightmares are back...
WARNING:
Season 3, spoilers for ‘McKay and Mrs Miller’.
Written for the SGA_flashfic
Doppelganger Challenge - sga_flashfic contains gen, ship and slash fics.
Beta:
Thank you to
Jayne Perry for the beta-reading.
Two Become One
By Leesa Perrie
Having Rod about had been hard. It certainly didn’t
help that his alternate self was so… friendly. So nice; nauseatingly
so. Or that his team, his sister even, seemed to prefer Rod
to him, at least at first.
No, it didn’t help matters that Rod was so well liked, and
Rodney
admitted freely to himself that, as much as he could, he’d
avoided his doppelganger.
He knew people thought it was petty of him, mean even, but he
didn’t like the guy, and seeing him brought back memories he
didn’t want to deal with. Nightmares that had been
deeply
buried returned, as fresh as the first time he’d dreamt them.
Of course, nor did it help to walk in on a conversation between Jeannie
and Rod about, well, about
that. The one thing that he didn’t
want to discuss.
The last thing he needed to know was that in Rod’s apparently
wonderful universe the event that haunted him hadn’t
happened;
that a certain person might still be alive.
It seemed, however, that although things were
different in Rod’s universe, the one who haunted
Rodney’s
dreams had in fact died; and that he might actually be the luckier one
this time. Though that depended on your point of view, of
course.
Rod was only three when Eddie died, and he hardly remembered
him.
Perhaps that was better, perhaps it was worse. Rodney thought
it
was probably worse overall, though only just. He was glad
he’d had longer to know Eddie than Rod had, even though the
pain
of losing him was more intense, more painful for those extra years.
In Rod’s universe, Eddie had fallen from a hotel balcony, in
Rodney’s he’d been stabbed by a mugger at the age
of
thirteen. The mugger had held them both up one evening, and
Eddie
had tried to fight back. Stupid and brave; all it had done
was
leave Rodney desperately trying to staunch the blood whilst shouting
for help.
By the time help came, Selwyn Edwin McKay, his brother, his identical
twin, had died in his arms.
He’d been devastated, inconsolable, and plagued by
nightmares; if
only he’d been the one to fight back, or had been able to
stop
his brother from doing so; if only he’d been able to stop the
bleeding; if only he’d shouted more loudly and help had come
quicker; if only they hadn’t been on their way home from the
library, where Eddie had come to find him and drag him home for dinner.
Jeannie had been devastated as well, his parents too, but somehow
he’d not seen it; blinded by his own pain as he
was. It had
driven the final wedge between his parents and him.
They’d
always loved Eddie a little bit more than him, like they did Jeannie,
and he knew they had wished he was the one that had died.
They
never said it outright, but he knew; he could see it in their faces; it
was there in their actions.
For a long time he’d wished it had
been him. It would have made them happier, and he
wouldn’t
have had to live with the self-destroying pain. It had been
years
before he could look in a mirror and not flinch at his reflection; the
memories plaguing him.
And now, here was a man who looked just like him, and therefore just
like Eddie. A man who brought back all the wondering of who
and
what and where his brother would be now, if he’d
lived.
Would he be a scientist? Eddie had possessed a passion for
chemistry that rivalled his own for physics, so surely that was a
yes. Would he be part of the stargate program? Here
on
Atlantis even? His brother had certainly been almost as
intelligent as himself, so probably that too.
But it was pointless to wonder. Pointless and painful.
He was beyond relived when Rod went home and things started to settle
back to normal.
Though it would be a long time before the nightmares settled, if the
past was anything to go by.
They would though, eventually. They always did.
Until something else stirred them up again.
The End
