"I've been banned from the labs. I don't have the gene anymore, and Carson won't give me the gene therapy -- says I'm too young for it to be safe -- and I can't get the city to do what I want it to do and--" Rodney presses his hands against his face, small fingers covering his closed eyes. When he speaks, he sounds like a kid describing the monster under the bed: terrified and vulnerable. "I think I'm losing my mind. Not my sanity, my actual mind. My memories, my knowledge. Possibly my IQ. I can't remember how things work or why. I look at my own theories and I don't understand them."
oh, RODNEY. i imagine rodney having—not a *bad* childhood necessarily, but he was always the most brilliant person in the room, and his family life—probably wasn't *bad*, but basically i think he was the kind of kid who knew things were going to be better when he was older and was always straining for that day. to be thrown back to twelve years old and helpless, to LOSE what he worked so hard to learn and achieve, has got to be devastating. he's such a strong little boy here, and who can say whether that's a remnant of the adult he grew into, or the bravery he always had. crying his eyes out in john's lap is simultaneously the cutest thing EVER and, you know, gut-wrenching.
as much as i pine for a happy ending to this, it brings up something the show tends to hint at but never explore (and sometimes i suspect even the hints are pure accidents), namely the tragedies inherent in and made possible by the technology they're exploring. i wouldn't *want* to see it in every fic (see above re: gut-wrenching), but it's such a good and haunting example of what can go wrong, how *much* it can go wrong. this is the doppelganger of light-hearted genderswappery, where the effects are permanent, the consequences are debilitating, and the end result is a twelve-year-old sobbing while his heart breaks, john losing his best friend to a one-way trip on the daedalus, and an atlantis without rodney mckay.
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oh, RODNEY. i imagine rodney having—not a *bad* childhood necessarily, but he was always the most brilliant person in the room, and his family life—probably wasn't *bad*, but basically i think he was the kind of kid who knew things were going to be better when he was older and was always straining for that day. to be thrown back to twelve years old and helpless, to LOSE what he worked so hard to learn and achieve, has got to be devastating. he's such a strong little boy here, and who can say whether that's a remnant of the adult he grew into, or the bravery he always had. crying his eyes out in john's lap is simultaneously the cutest thing EVER and, you know, gut-wrenching.
as much as i pine for a happy ending to this, it brings up something the show tends to hint at but never explore (and sometimes i suspect even the hints are pure accidents), namely the tragedies inherent in and made possible by the technology they're exploring. i wouldn't *want* to see it in every fic (see above re: gut-wrenching), but it's such a good and haunting example of what can go wrong, how *much* it can go wrong. this is the doppelganger of light-hearted genderswappery, where the effects are permanent, the consequences are debilitating, and the end result is a twelve-year-old sobbing while his heart breaks, john losing his best friend to a one-way trip on the daedalus, and an atlantis without rodney mckay.