Fic: Two Weeks Notice (SGA, McKay/Zelenka, PG) - Main Post/Link/Part 1

[zelempa]

"Two Weeks Notice" by zelempa
Fandom, Pairing: Stargate: Atlantis, McKay/Zelenka
Category, Genre: Slash, Romantic Comedy
Length: Approx. 10,000 words. GOD. WHAT HAPPENED.
Rating: PG
Notes: Finished just in time! For the reel_sga Romantic Comedy challenge. Based loosely on (or rather, the premise of) Two Weeks Notice. It is not necessary to have seen the movie. Set in early season 4, but I do not believe there are any spoilers. Thanks to keefaq and yolsaffbridge for speed-beta.

Summary: "You take me for granted," Rodney barreled on. "You'll be lost without me!"

"I take

you for granted!" Zelenka stood, now, his stupid Freecell game forgotten. "You have no idea how much I do around here..."

"Of course I do! You take care of all the, the little things I don't care about, thus freeing me up to do the real work. Why do you think I've kept you around all this time?"

"That is wonderful," said Zelenka. "I am your bitch boy."

"Yes!" cried Rodney, delighted that he understood.

Read the entire story at my site...

 

Monday

"Now that we're back in contact with Earth," Carter began, and then paused, as if expecting applause. Rodney looked up from his housekeeping of the citywide network code. Sheppard was creating the illusion of a rubber pencil; Zelenka was busy with a laptop, probably playing Freecell. Freecell was one of the many impossible and thoroughly pointless skills at which Radek excelled, like pigeon farming and crocheting and Ruby on Rails.

Carter continued, "There will be some important personnel changes in the next few weeks. We have some fresh faces in the science team"--Rodney sighed loudly; newbies were more trouble than they were worth--"and we'll be saying goodbye to some of our own." This was no surprise. Every time they were back in contact with Earth after a division, a handful of people left, afraid it was their last chance. Rodney thought of these people dismissively as "weekenders": people who weren't in it for the long haul. Carter read a few unfamiliar names, people too recent or unimportant to have made it onto Rodney's radar.

"Finally," she concluded, "I've just learned that two weeks from today, our own Dr. Radek Zelenka will be taking over as head of engineering back at Cheyenne." Zelenka ducked his head in acknowledgement of the sudden stares and then focused back on his screen, as if that would be the end of it. "Please join me in congratulating him on his promotion, and in granting him our best wishes. I know I'm new around here, but I think I speak for all of us when I say he will be deeply and sincerely missed."

"You don't speak for me!" said Rodney, jumping out of his seat. "Zelenka, what the hell?"

"Oh. Yes. I apologize for not telling you sooner, Rodney," said Zelenka, sparing him a glance. "I just found out about it myself."

"You only just found out that you applied for and got a job at Stargate Command?"

Zelenka shrugged in a way that was probably supposed to convey humility, but it was obvious he was smirking inside. "I did not think that I would get it."

"Of course you'd get it! You've been on Atlantis! We solve twenty problems in the time it takes them to get their morning coffee requisition form! Only a complete idiot would consider leaving Atlantis a good career move. Are you a complete idiot, Zelenka?"

"The evidence does suggest that, yes," said Zelenka coldly. "I have continued to work for you for three years."

"Working for me is the best thing that could have happened to you! Anyone with half a brain would kill to work for me!"

"Moving right along," said Carter anxiously.

"You take me for granted," Rodney barreled on. "You'll be lost without me!"

"I take you for granted!" Zelenka stood, now, his stupid Freecell game forgotten. "You have no idea how much I do around here..."

"Of course I do! You take care of all the, the little things I don't care about, thus freeing me up to do the real work. Why do you think I've kept you around all this time?"

"That is wonderful," said Zelenka. "I am your bitch boy."

"Yes!" cried Rodney, delighted that he understood.

"I did not get a PhD to collect various fruits for your basket!"

"That was you?" asked Carter. "Thank you. It was very nice!"

"Hey, picking a couple of berries is a small price to pay for all the really cool stuff you get to do," said Rodney.

"Oh, yes, the cool stuff, like cleaning up after explosions, or comforting people who are crying, or meddling with control panels underwater, or in outer space, or with shots flying," he illustrated with frantic hand motions, "or debugging your code." He shuddered.

"Well, you do those things well!" Rodney shouted, angry, more than anything else, that Zelenka had forced him into a compliment in front of all these people.

"I know!" said Zelenka. "And it would be nice to get some recognition for it, instead of opening up the email with the new declassified paper, 'Theoretical Models for Molecular Stabilization in Cross-Dimensional Travel' by Dr. Rodney McKay."

"Hey, practically everything in that paper was proved wrong by our later work; you should thank me for taking the blame."

"It is still lightyears ahead of the rest of the research in that field!"

"Exactly!" Rodney shouted. "We're the only ones doing this stuff! What do you want to go back to Earth for? You may as well go back in time to the Dark Ages, which, by the way, we have a lot better chance of doing than they do!"

"The SGC is doing exciting work these days."

"Yeah, right," snorted Rodney. "Exciting work in the field of collating TPS reports."

"And building small, maneuverable aircraft equipped with hyperdrive...."

"You're going to be designing planes?"

"Don't encourage him, Sheppard," Rodney snapped. "He's not going."

"The decision is made, Rodney. Two weeks from today, I will be gone."

"You," said Rodney, waving his index finger at Zelenka. "You know what you are? A quitter."

"And you are an arrogant micromanaging ass." Zelenka pronounced the insult with clear precision, as if he were reading off a gate address, which was somehow more maddening than if he'd shouted.

"And you are a whiny little ingrate!"

At which point Zelenka launched into a complicated series of epithets in Czech, and Carter stood up, clapped her hands, and declared, "Adjourned!"

 

Tuesday

"Revenge? That's a ridiculous notion. I don't even care," said Rodney. "Good riddance to bad rubbish, that's what I say."

"Just asking." Sheppard swung back and forth in the rolling chair. "Cause the last time we took him to M7G-677--"

"It's not my problem. Look, I don't see where this is an issue. Is this a critical mission?"

Sheppard shrugged. "Just a check-in."

"Fine, then I'm much more valuable here."

"Okay." Sheppard glided out of the chair. "I'll go break the news to Dr. Z. I'm sure he'll be thrilled."

Rodney waved him off and turned back to the daily energy consumption numbers he'd been pretending to find fascinating while Sheppard had been talking. He blinked. Now that he paid real attention to them, they were fascinating, in an accident-by-the-side-of-the-road kind of way.

"Who perpetrated this?" he bellowed.

The "scientists" looked up, frozen, as one, in terror, and then scuttled into various shadowy corners.

Rodney rubbed his temples. Since Zelenka had announced his imminent departure, Rodney had half-pragmatically, half-petulantly shifted almost all of his duties to other underlings, but now he remembered why he didn't, as a rule, do that. He sighed and sat down to waste a couple of hours redoing everyone else's work.

Every fix brought to mind nine others that had to be made; his inbox was pinging like mad; and his to-do list had just officially spiraled out of control when some Swedish or Finnish or otherwise Scandinavian or possibly Germanic doctor edged up to him.

"I, uh," he said, thrust a tablet into Rodney's hand, and dashed off.

"What..." Rodney examined it. "Oh, for fuck's sake! Don't tell me you all broke the water distribution system designed by the freaking Ancients. Come on, now. A couple of millennia of neglect, no problem, pure hot water right out of the tap, but you guys mess with it for a day and it's shot. Where did you people come from?"

"To be fair," piped up one particularly brave/stupid American (or Armenian), "the training here is very sink-or-swim, and we've never had to--"

"Shut up, you," moaned Rodney. "I hate you all."

 

Wednesday

"Whatcha doin'?"

"Writing an email to Zelenka's new bosses at Cheyenne." Rodney shot an evil eye across the mess, to the back of Zelenka's head, and said loudly enough to be heard, "Is 'underachiever' one word or two?"

Sheppard put his tray down, closed Rodney's laptop almost on his fingers, and gave him a pudding before he could object. "Have you ever considered that you catch more flies with honey?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Rodney around a mouthful of chocolate vanilla swirl.

 

Thursday

Rodney found Zelenka quietly recalibrating the water system.

"Hey," he said. "Don't--"

Zelenka looked up with a weary "what now?" expression.

"I mean, yes," said Rodney. "Good. It's good, that you're doing that. I always spend less time fixing your mistakes than anyone else's."

"That is my greatest ambition," said Zelenka gravely.

"I mean, sure, you always allocate too many resources to the botany labs," Rodney continued, kind of getting into this "honey" thing, "but at least you've heard of the word 'efficiency,' unlike some of the wanton wasters whose job this supposedly is. In fact, I'd go so far as to say--"

"I am on top of this, Rodney," said Zelenka. "I will let you know when I am finished."

Rodney frowned. Obviously he'd have to be more direct. "You're good at your job!" he barked.

Zelenka paused, and then turned his face up slowly from the display. "Rodney? Are you ill?"

"Never mind," Rodney muttered, hot-faced. Maybe he was a little feverish. "Just kidding. Goodbye."

 

Friday

"What the hell!" cried Rodney. "I take back everything good I ever said about you."

"You may have it," said Zelenka.

"You may not have realized this, so I'm going to lay it out for you: the improvements I made to the water system? Were improvements. You weren't supposed to undo them!"

"You think in ten minutes you can improve on the Ancients' system?"

"Yes! I do, actually! If we'd ever taken the time to really look at it, we'd see there are some obvious inconsistencies in the way they streamline--"

"It must have been for a reason; they would have fixed something like that--"

"You think they're infallible? Only one person is infallible around here, and that's me!" Rodney declared. "I'm putting it back the way I had it. You, go, go outside and play."

Saturday

"Stop gloating."

"Gloating is inconsistent with standing knee-deep in water," said Zelenka. "I am simply informing you that our reserves drop below the red line in ten minutes. But there is good news," he continued brightly. "I will be gone before the dehydration and dysentery begin."

"Excellent," said Rodney, suspiciously holding his laptop higher above the waterline. "Let's just fix this before you drown."

"What is that, a short joke? You can do better than that, Rodney." Zelenka turned back to his tablet. "I do not understand why this happened. I subtly sabotaged most of your changes to the system."

"I know. I added some different changes," said Rodney. "Better ones, I might add, and if the Ancients' code hadn't been so messy..."

"No, I assumed you would do that. I accounted for it. I..." Zelenka frowned. "Oh!" he exclaimed suddenly. "Look at this." He held out his tablet to Rodney.

"What, that? Oh, that's one of the best things. It's a subroutine that takes that, you know, the purity measurement, the one we're calling P-sub-A, and it compares it against--"

"No, no, I know, it's very good, but look here. Look, the program is ignoring this whole section. You always make this mistake. Ancient is not COBOL, you know."

"You're a laugh a minute," said Rodney, annoyed, mostly because he knew Zelenka was right. That was why he was so invaluable as a debugger, even if he did hate it; he knew Rodney's style so well that he could distinguish between boneheaded mistakes and brilliant innovations, which was at times difficult even for Rodney.

They spent the next half-hour sniping at each other for backseat coding, but when they finished the system it was more robust than it had ever been before. Rodney was a big picture kind of guy, not a piddling details kind of guy, and he'd never have caught some of the things Zelenka did. He'd just have to face it: the guy served a useful function. He'd never admit it out loud, but it was possible the science division was going to be as lost without Zelenka as Zelenka was going to be without the brilliant beacon of Rodney's genius.

 

Sunday

Rodney woke up in the middle of the night with a sudden brainstorm. Piddling little details! That was what computers were for! A simple program would make Dr. Zelenka completely irrelevant, which was handy, since he was leaving anyway. He rolled over and grabbed the nearest tablet.

He worked through his morning appointments but his stomach rumbled around ten and he brought his computer with him to the mess. He was in coding haze and he had no idea how long he stayed there or how many squares of that crumbly coffee cake kind of stuff he'd had, but at a certain point, he lost momentum. The obstacles were beginning to outweigh the inspirations. For one thing, Zelenka was actually better at hardware than programming, and in order to make the AI take over that part of the job, and check Rodney's fixes to jumpers and gates and consoles, he'd need either a whole lot of possible interface hookups or an audiovisual input, ideally both. More importantly, he couldn't count on always using the same programming languages and hardware configurations or making the same mistakes, and he didn't want to have to rewrite the thing every time they made a new innovation. The program would have to be able to adapt. He looked up through the windows. The sun was setting, the entire city was bitching at him over email, and he'd hardly gotten started.

"Thought I'd find you here. What'd you do, leave your radio in your quarters?"

Great, because amusing Colonel Sheppard was exactly the thing Rodney needed to do right now. "I happen to be busy on a project of paramount importance. I don't have time to be the personal tech support guy for everyone in this galaxy."

"It's okay. Zelenka already fixed my Xbox," said Sheppard, and wasn't that a kick in the face: not only was the little git leaving him without a code-checker, he was undermining Rodney with his teammates. Watch him make off with Rodney's coffee stash, get to Earth, and steal the affection of Rodney's cat. Affecting a mournful tone, Sheppard added, "I really don't know where we'll be without him."

"Pshh," said Rodney. "Actually, I'm nearly finished writing a simple application to replace him." It was almost true.

Sheppard peered over his shoulder and gave a nod of fake understanding, the way people tended to do during Rodney's answers to questions like "How does this technology actually work?" or "And what did you study in university?" or "Oh, you're from Ontario? What part?"

"Seriously, Rodney," said Sheppard. "Wouldn't it be easier just to be nice to him?"

"You're always telling me to do that to people," said Rodney. "You know it doesn't actually work for me, right? I'm not good at it."

"To be fair, you don't practice," said Sheppard. "Oh, speaking of people you've been mean to, broken gate on Surf'n'Sun World. For some reason they asked for you special."

"Oh, lord, those jokers," Rodney groaned. "Shoot me now."

"Come on, Rodney. How do you manage to hate paradise? Is it the white beaches, the blue waves, the pretty girls with massage oil..."

"More like UV rays, mutant sharks, and if you think I was going to let anyone smear an unknown substance on my skin, you severely underestimate my--"

"Paranoia?"

"--foresight. Certain laundry detergents give me hives, and I think I smelled something suspiciously limey in that concoction."

Sheppard got up, smirking. "Don't forget to pack your bathing suit."

Rodney made a dismissive gesture and then returned ostentatiously to his work. Immediately he remembered how directly he was headed for nowhere.

God, why was Zelenka doing this to him? He should be smacked. Or maybe Rodney could send him to Surf'n'Sun. Of course, he'd probably like it, the bastard. Everyone else did.

Then again, he'd probably like it. Everyone else did. Everyone else liked it a lot, actually!

Possibly Rodney had been underestimating Sheppard as a strategist.

 

Monday

"I don't see why we both had to come."

"Because I apparently fixed something last time I was here, so now they're under the impression that I'm a mechanic on call, and everyone on Atlantis is so in love with their stupid surf'n'sun planet that I'm not allowed to disabuse them of this notion."

"Let me rephrase," said Zelenka. "I don't see why I had to come."

"Because Colonel Carter likes to reward quitters with beach vacations," said Rodney, wagering that if he sounded bitter enough, Zelenka wouldn't question it further.

He lucked out. Zelenka simply assumed an expression of silent judgment, and they trudged on, the journey made twice as long by the sinking of their shoes into the shifting sand. From above, the relentless sun beat down. Rodney opened his mouth to complain, remembered he was supposed to be selling this planet as an example of the Natural Beauty and Wonder of the Pegasus Galaxy (You Won't Find This On Earth^TM!), and closed it again.

"This is miserable," said Zelenka finally.

"Hmph," Rodney frowned. Zelenka was really starting to piss him off. (Starting to?) If he couldn't find one goddamn moment of pleasure or appreciation on the paradise planet, what hope was there for him? He may as well go back to Earth, for all he appreciated being here. His plan wasn't working, Zelenka was being a whiny bitch, and on top of that, Rodney's face itched, his back and shoulders were baking in his dark shirt, and he was walking on something pointy. "Okay, how is it that there's sand in my watertight boots? I--" Oh, whoops. Rodney shut up so suddenly that Zelenka glanced at him quizzically.

Screw it. "Plus, I'm getting a sunburn!" Nobody could possibly expect him to maintain a positive upbeat attitude while his face was peeling off.

"I'm sorry," said Zelenka, but he didn't sound sorry. "What do you want me to do?"

"Give me your jacket to hold over my head."

"Gladly." Zelenka had been carrying his jacket since they left the jumper. He'd chosen in his infinite wisdom to wear a long-sleeved shirt underneath. He was going to get heatstroke and die; at least the science division was semi-prepared to do without him.

They finally reached the sentries who escorted them to the main pavilion. The chieftain or mayor or prince-lord or whatever his title was--the one Rodney had yelled at, but, apparently, impressed--emerged from one of the white-roofed huts and greeted them with wide outstretched arms. Zelenka stepped back dubiously. Rodney knew how he felt; he hoped it was a gesture of "observe the magnificence of my domain" and not "give us a hug!" But the mayor, or chieftain, dropped his arms when he came closer, and there was the usual welcome-to-our-fair-land song and dance. The mayor assumed that they intended to spend the evening enjoying the pleasures of the village before heading out to make the repairs in the morning, and Rodney agreed with a ready "Yes, fine, fine," before Zelenka could finish protesting.

"Our beaches and glens are at your disposal; and we are known across many lands for our fine and ancient tradition, passed down from generation to generation since time immemorial, of erotic massage." The prince-lord gestured backward at a triad of nubile young women in diaphanous robes, who bowed their heads and blinked flirtatiously at the ground in the general area of the guests.

"Oh, excellent," Zelenka murmured. "Exploitation of the underclass."

Rodney turned to Zelenka, boggling. The massage-based culture had made him vaguely uncomfortable the last time he'd been there, mainly for reasons of vanity--these girls were surrounded by washboard abs and bronzed skin all day, and he panicked that they'd think he was some kind of hideous cave-dwelling slug-creature--but he'd never even thought to be uncomfortable about exploiting the underclass. How Zelenka saw beautiful girls and thought "workers of the world unite," Rodney didn't know, but it was kind of priceless.

"Okay, yeah, no thanks on that," Rodney told the chieftain. "Can we just get something to eat?"

He should have known the chieftain would have a whole banquet planned. Practically the entire town gathered around a long bench covered in bowls of suspicious-looking fruit and an entire roast porcine of some kind. The chief and a couple of his friends sat across from Rodney and eagerly watched him eat and tried to impress him with their pseudoscientific theories. They seemed to assume Zelenka was a member of the underclass; he sat next to Rodney, but some massage girls were on his other side, staring at the table in front of him and nervously giggling in lieu of engaging him in meaningful conversation. Rodney kept an eye on them. The last thing he needed was for someone to specifically come out and call Zelenka on his second-fiddle status, and remind him why he was going. The chief and his pals did their best to distract him, though. They had an interest in science, but a complete inability to understand it; they questioned Rodney endlessly about the workings of his equipment, of the gate, of the universe in general, but blinked vacantly during his particularly-stupid-child-level explanations, and then interrupted him with questions like "And who imbued this--'handheld'--with life?" Finally Zelenka piped up, informing them earnestly that it was powered by tiny elves. Rodney coughed violently, and Zelenka covered for him by making an "Oops! I have said too much" face.

After the walk in the sun and the heavy dinner they were ready for bed, so a pair of the girls from the oppressed proletariat showed them to their little guest hut, inconveniently located about a jillion miles away from the main village for the purposes of (a) impressing people like Sheppard with the undisturbed seaside vista and (b) personally paining Rodney. They arrived at their destination about ten minutes after Rodney was totally sure his legs were going to rebel and refuse to carry him any further, and he'd end up sleeping facedown in the sand. The girls left them and set out back to town, cheerful and unwinded and undoubtedly pitying the alien scientists for their apparent tragic cardiovascular diseases.

"I call the bed," said Rodney. The bag of leaves that passed for a mattress would undoubtedly be terrible for his back, but right now, it looked as good as a goosefeather bed.

In direct violation of the international law of dibs, Zelenka threw himself down onto the bed and was instantly asleep, or pretended to be. Well, great. That left the floor and the weird bench thing, but they looked extremely uncomfortable, and what the hell, Zelenka hadn't even called it properly. Rodney shoved him over, claimed a side of the bed, and went to sleep.