These Fragments

Disclaimer: Stargate does not belong to me, it belongs to…er…a bunch of guys who work in TV and movies and stuff. TS Eliot's _The Wasteland_ does not belong to me, either, although I've grabbed a ton of it and pasted it straight in here (it's mostly pretty evident where I've done so). You can find the whole poem here (.) as well as elsewhere on the internets. The title of the fic comes from a place near the very end of the poem: "These fragments I have shored against my ruin."

Warnings: Character death! But, uh, it IS a canon character-death... Spoilers for Sunday, but if you haven't seen Sunday, where have you BEEN? And, um, half of this is completely un-beta-ed, and was written by me in the last two hours, and it does happen to be 5:30 in the morning. But I think it's not too bad. Let me know if you see any mistakes.

NB. This might be an utter flop, but I sorta enjoyed writing it, so I thought I'd share. Carson died around the same time as both my grandmother and my puppy, and also right after I'd finished my Modern British Lit class in college, so all the elements were sorta sitting around when I started writing this, a couple years ago. If you really want any idea of what the poem is about (or, perhaps, what the story is about: I haven't had anyone proofread who hasn't read the poem) you should look online for _The Wasteland _(by TS Eliot), because I really don't explore the deepest bits of the poem in here—I just happened to be flipping through, and found some pieces that were rather uncannily related, in my messed up mind, to Carson's death. The point didn't seem so much to really figure out what the poem meant in general, for either my sake or Rodney's, but just to use the poem as a way to explore Rodney's grief. Furthermore, it occurred to me that two things Rodney probably doesn't understand at _all_ are death and poetry. So…yeah. Without further ado: the story.

* * *

McKay: I should have just gone fishing with him.

Dex: (whispering) Don't.

McKay: No. If I'd gone fishing, if I'd checked the machine, if I hadn't assigned two junior guys to catalogue the lab—

Dex: Rodney. What's done is done.

McKay: I know. (Whispering) That's what's killing me.

* * *

It felt wrong to go to sleep when he knew his best friend would never wake up.

He went through Carson's things today, and now he couldn't stop thinking. So he went through his own stuff too, digging under the mattress and behind the desk, and found a stylus, two pens, a nickel, and—tucked behind the manuscript he'd been writing on his observations of physics in subspace—a thin volume. _The Wasteland,_ it said, by TS Eliot. Rodney didn't usually appreciate poetry, but Carson had given him this book—

_Back when they first met, or soon after, and Beckett had a day off and Rodney had an hour off and they'd bumped into each other at the northwest pier. And Beckett was reading. Rodney asked, out of politeness, and he'd been given a volume of poetry—"Here, read it, maybe you'll like it. It's a lovely poem," all in that fascinating accent that Rodney was in love with, even though he'd never fallen in love with anything that didn't have fur or exponents. And Rodney had been a little terrified, because __**poetry? **__Really? But he'd taken it because that accent just wrapped around him like Kitty Cat's body had wound around his feet when she was feeling affectionate. Maybe, Rodney thought, the book would be like Carson's accent, and that wouldn't be so bad—_

But he'd forgotten about the book, and apparently so had Carson. He opened it, now, for the first time, and saw a handwritten note inside. _For Carson,_ it said, _with all my love, Dad._

He put down the book and went to the northwest pier, feeling the wind, and pretended he wasn't crying.

* * *

He really wasn't a poetry person, and he was pretty sure he never would be, but he thought if he'd started earlier, like maybe two decades ago, he could figure out what it all means. As it was, every few lines something happened to him. _Mixing/Memory and desire_ and _Winter kept us warm_ and _the dry stone no sound of water,_ and you look out on to the water, the vast ocean, and think you may as well be in a desert. This poetry makes you feel as small as an electron and as big as a galaxy, and (_you were still too small to save him_) it reminds you of the music—

_On the stage, some recital, it didn't matter which one. If you put your fingers in just the right place, and the rhythm was beating in your head, ONE-two-three-ONE-two-three, and if you could forget that your mother was holding her breath, waiting for you to fuck up, then there was the music, and it told you things that there weren't words for—_

* * *

_Unreal City,_ he read, and thought, _Fuck, yeah._ Eliot knew what he was talking about, even though he absolutely didn't, and it wasn't exactly right (_A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/ I had not thought death had undone so many)_ but it was too right nonetheless.

He was tired of crying.

* * *

It was just after the second memorial service, and it probably wouldn't be the last. In the first one, Elizabeth had quoted George Fabricius, whoever he was. Who knew what they'd say in Scotland, but at the SGC Sheppard had recited "In Flanders Fields."

"It wasn't the right poem," Rodney murmured.

Sheppard looked at him. "What?"

"'Flanders Fields.' It wasn't the right poem."

Sheppard looked at him. "It's a Canadian poem."

McKay frowned. "I know it is. That doesn't mean it's the right one. Anyway, Carson isn't—" He swallowed. "Wasn't… Canadian."

"The guy who wrote it was a doctor, right? Carson was a doctor."

Rodney looked at him sadly. "It still wasn't right."

Sheppard sighed. "No poem is going to be right," he said tiredly. "The whole situation isn't right. How could a poem make it better?"

_Only there is shadow under this red rock, _Rodney thought, but didn't speak.

He rang the bell, Sheppard and Ronon behind him.

This, then, was where Carson had grown up, thought Rodney. This little house on the outskirts of Glasgow, with its tiny garden (_Breeding/lilacs out of the dead land,_ he thought, and now he couldn't get it _out _of his head) and not a sheep in sight. He closed his eyes as he heard footsteps approaching the door. "I can't do this," he muttered, and turned, trying to push through his teammates.

Sheppard grabbed his shoulders and turned him back around. "You_ can_ do this," he insisted.

The door opened, and a little old lady looked out. "Hullo?"

Rodney swallowed. "Um, hi. Mrs. Beckett?" Her accent made him want to cry.

"Aye, that's me," she said, frowning, "And ye, sir?"

"Oh. Well, I'm, uh…"

Suddenly, she smiled warmly. "Oh, I know who ye are now. Carson told me—showed me a picture, last time he was home. Ye're Rodney, is that right? Is Carson coming?"

Rodney stared silently for a second, and then his face crumpled.

After a moment, Mrs. Beckett blinked sadly. "I see," she said. "Well…" She sighed. "Come inside, the lot of ye. I'll see if we can make ye some tea."

* * *

It felt like a dream, one of the bad ones where you knew you were dreaming, and if you could just wait it out long enough you'd wake up, and everything would be fine.

"You're just tired," Sheppard told him. "It's been a stressful couple of days, and you haven't slept since you were in Pegasus."

And he was right, Rodney had been awake for the SGC and the flight to Scotland, and the funeral, then the flight back to the US, and now they were going to Canada because Rodney seemed to be the only one who wasn't estranged from his entire family, which seemed strange, but he was tired enough and foggy enough that he didn't pursue the thought.

He was looking at _The Wasteland,_ chapter two ("Are they called chapters in poetry?" he decided to ask Carson, before realizing that he couldn't ask Carson), not really reading because his eyes wouldn't focus anymore, and he didn't understand the chapter anyway except maybe it was about literature because Shakespeare wrote stuff, right, and Eliot was talking about Shakespeare--? when a wave of red heat washed through the core of him and suddenly he was drowning in blame. Suddenly the whole world (_Two galaxies, maybe more)_ were at fault for Carson's death, Sheppard for not stopping him, somehow, and Carson's mother for letting him grow up to be a doctor and the kid at the airport shop where he'd bought a candy bar, not even caring if it had lemon in it, for who knows what, and Carson himself, _why were you so __**stupid,**__ you idiot_ and most of all Rodney himself, who should have just gone fishing with the man, and "fuck," he said out loud, a tiny little voice that he could barely hear over the plane's roar.

Sheppard heard, though, and looked at him, then pressed the service button, and soon a glass of wine was in Rodney's hand and Sheppard was telling him, "Drink that, Rodney. Then go to sleep. You're exhausted," and Rodney didn't so much as sleep as pass out there in the back row, turbulence shaking his heart until he felt like he didn't have a heart anymore. But by then he was falling.

Jeannie was worried—understandably, he would have said, if he was more coherent, but it was probably his incoherence that made her so worried, so that didn't exactly work out. "What's _wrong_?" she kept saying, until Rodney pulled out Chapter Two and maybe he understood a little now. _"What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?"_ and Sheppard pulled the book out of his hands and said, "Rodney, what _is_ this?" and pulled him off the couch and into the guest room. He took off Rodney's shirt and shoes and pants, and Rodney was only in his boxers now and John laid him down on the bed, carefully laying the book on the night table. "Sleep," he said gently, and lay on the floor and took a nap of his own while Rodney dreamed of—

_Carson, clucking, "You idiot—"_

_Carson, smiling warmly, saying, "D'ye really think I'd feed ye lemonade, Rodney?"_

_Carson, on the pier, sun setting, and they're talking. Just two friends, talking—_

"Rodney, wake up," Sheppard said, and Rodney was awake, his dreams evaporating. "Jeannie was getting worried," Sheppard told him. "You've been asleep for a long time. Think you can get out of bed?"

After greeting Jeannie—apparently he didn't get that far before going to bed—he pulled out the book again, turning one more time to chapter two. He thought he may have understood it, a little, before he went to sleep, but it was gone again. He turned to the first chapter and sighed, looking through the now-familiar words, _April is the cruellest month, _but it was June, so there was another piece that didn't fit. He turned back to the second chapter and realized there was a name. _A Game of Chess--_

_He and Carson only ever played chess twice, because he beat Carson both times, and the third time he'd pulled out the board, Carson had chuckled and said, "Isn't the other side of the board backgammon?" and Rodney didn't know how to play backgammon, so they'd compromised. Carson was a wicked checkers player—_

He turned to the next chapter.

* * *

He was starting to feel like an invalid, and they all treated him like he was a very fragile and possibly very expensive piece of laboratory equipment, even Kaleb. He was pretty sure Kaleb hated him, but the man had tried very valiantly to smile at him when they were in the same room, and Rodney just thought of how much this guy must like Rodney's sister, that he'd put up with Rodney for Jeannie's sake.

He was sitting on the porch one night, watching Madison play with all the other men—Ronon, Sheppard, Kaleb. Jeannie sat on the other side of the porch, working on her laptop. Rodney could swear she wasn't paying any attention to the tag-and-tickle war going on twenty feet away, but every time Madison let out a particularly delighted shriek, she'd look up at them all and smile. Rodney watched her, happy, focused, safe, and was glad she'd married Kaleb. He wished he'd found a cute English major to marry, too.

He wished Carson had found someone to marry, had stayed on Earth with her. He wished that he'd never met Carson, and that Carson was safe in Scotland, saving sheep from colic or whatever it was sheep got, and having babies with Scottish accents that he could chase around the yard at twilight.

Kaleb, panting, trudged up the steps and collapsed into a chair next to Rodney's. "Whoa!" he said. "Okay, now I need a shower."

Rodney saw his sister's eyes flick up to them as she smiled in amusement and then looked down at her laptop again. Rodney himself didn't know what to say. He decided not to say anything.

Kaleb just sat beside him for a few minutes, gazing out at his kid and her playmates (guys, Rodney thought, who had killed without a second thought). Rodney looked, too, and when he looked back at the man a few minutes later, Kaleb was looking at the book in his hand. "Not exactly quantum mechanics," he said quietly, then looked up and smiled. "Jeannie never told me you like poetry."

"I don't," Rodney said, feeling awkward. "That is, I've never really read any. I just started this a few days ago—"

"It's a classic," Kaleb told him. "Do you like it?"

"I don't even know what it's _about,_" Rodney blurted, and then blushed slightly. "It's kind of dense. And symbolic and stuff. I was never much of a literature person." And why was he saying this? Kaleb didn't even like him!

Kaleb just smiled, though, and gently took the book from Rodney's hand. "Well, it's sort of about, I dunno, despair and hopelessness, you know—a wasteland. How modern life is useless and there's not much to it. There's a lot of talk about dead stuff—"

"Yeah, I got that part," Rodney muttered.

"—And, he talks about modern life, and the pain of growth, and things like that."

"So, basically, it's about life being shitty," Rodney said. He felt the anger boiling up in him, like it had on the plane, but this time he clamped it down. "What a terrible thing to write a poem about! Aren't poems supposed to be happy and hopeful and stuff?"

"Well…it's not all terrible. Like, in the very end, there's the bit that—"

"No, wait," Rodney interrupted. "Don't tell me, I haven't gotten that far yet."

Kaleb shruged, his face inscrutable. "Okay, I won't give it away. How far have you gotten, then?"

"Um—" Rodney took the book back, scanned through the third chapter—maybe he should ask Kaleb if they're called chapters, he thought, but then he decided against it quickly—he already seemed like enough of an idiot. "Here," he said, and cleared his throat. "'_This music crept by me upon the waters'/ And along the Strand, up Queen Victoria Street./ O City city, I can sometimes hear—"_

And Kaleb was joining in, now: "_Beside a public bar in Lower Thames Street, the pleasant whining of a mandolin, and a clatter and a chatter within, where fishmen lounge at noon._" He smiled at Rodney, and Rodney decided he liked English majors, at least a little bit, at least this one. "Ever gone fishing, Rodney?"

And Rodney's heart dropped deep into his abdomen, and he swallowed, and struggled to keep a smile on his face. "No," he said, his voice sounding strange and far away. "Can't say I've ever had the opportunity." And he missed Atlantis, suddenly, fiercely. _O City city—_

The Dedalus was scheduled to leave two days later, and Sheppard made sure that they were all three of them there in time. Rodney made sure to leer at Sam Carter as much as possible in the four hours he was back at the SGC, just so he could feel normal, but it didn't make him feel normal. He blamed it on Sam, who was entirely too sympathetic, and hardly glared at him at all, even when he was staring at her butt for two whole minutes. She brought him chicken—"Not lemon, McKay, I promise," with that cheeky little grin, and he ate it, feeling awkward and hungry and also not at _all_ hungry. And Sheppard did that even more awkward patting-the-back thing.

"Why aren't you upset?" he blurted to Sheppard, after Sam had left them alone. "You and Ronon, it's like you don't even care or something."

Sheppard winced. "McKay, it's not like that," he said, and then Rodney realized that Sheppard was taking it as an accusation, even though he totally hadn't meant it that way. "I'm just bad at…this stuff," Sheppard went on. "Trust me, as soon as I get to a real gym, I'm gonna beat some stuff up. That's kinda…how it works for me."

"Yeah," Rodney said glumly, then, "I wish I was good at beating stuff up."

"Hey," Sheppard shrugged, "at least you're better than you used to be."

It took the standard two weeks for them to travel from the Milky Way to Pegasus, and true to his word, Sheppard hit the gym. He'd go in there at least once a day, usually for several hours. Ronon went, though not as much as Sheppard. "Need a shooting range," he'd grunted once, and Rodney did admit that the prospect of blowing holes in things did sound enticing. Rodney didn't do much working out, but he did sometimes go to the gym and watch Sheppard lay into punching bags for hours, until he was practically blind with sweat and falling over with exhaustion, and then he'd wait outside the bathroom for forty minutes while Sheppard washed the salty sweat off his body. He wondered if sweat and tears were the same, chemically, and didn't know the answer. Carson would, but Carson was gone.

He was reading more slowly, now, sleeping during most of the hours he wasn't eating or watching Sheppard kill gym equipment. He finished the third chapter and then stopped, unable to pick the book up again.

It didn't help that—

_Burning burning burning burning_

_O Lord Thou pluckest me out_

_O Lord Thou pluckest_

_burning_

—he woke screaming twice, wondering what it would be like to burn to death.

* * *

_Phlebas the Phonecian, a fortnight dead,_

_Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep seas swell_

_And the profit and loss._

They made him go to Kate, but he refused to talk about Carson.

He talked, of course: about Sheppard being stupid about something, about Ronon beating him up (okay, he may have been whining a bit here, but really, his arm _hurt_) and about Teyla, who had been even more kind than usual after their return to Atlantis, teaching him how to dance an Athosian folk-dance. He also mentioned the poem.

He was on the fourth chapter now, and it was another one of the ones that seemed too right to be an accident. He'd talked about that with Kaleb one day, not mentioning what in particular seemed so scarily right about the poem, and Kaleb had just shrugged and said, "Poetry is like that." The fourth chapter, of course, was about Phlebas the Phonecian, who had drowned—something about how everyone died in the end, and Rodney had seen more evidence for this on Atlantis than he needed—certainly, he didn't need Carson's poem to know that. He thought it was odd, though, that Carson hadn't died by drowning—that so many people had managed to escape that fate, surrounded as they were by endless millions of tons of water, and had died in fire or war instead.

Kate found his interest in the poem fascinating. "Why that particular poem?" she asked, but since Rodney wasn't talking about Carson, he couldn't tell her that it was his poem. And since Rodney wasn't talking about Carson, he couldn't tell her that every third line reminded him of Carson, and every fifth line reminded him of how Carson had died, and how he was responsible (he was always responsible), so all he said was, "The fourth chapter talks about drowning. I was remembering when I almost drowned." He did remember: Carter had shown up, delightfully naked. Here was the part where Rodney expected to wish he could hallucinate again, so he could hallucinate Carson instead. Surprisingly, though, Rodney didn't want that. He wanted the real Carson back or none at all.

It wasn't strictly true that he never talked about Carson: the man did come up occasionally in conversation, either by accident ("You should get Carson to check that out—" and then an awkward silence) or, gently, on purpose ("C'mon, you remember that movie. I coulda sworn you saw it. It was me, you, Ronon and Carson—Ronon was complaining about the kissing.") But they never really talked about _it_. It didn't quite seem to work.

* * *

And then, the time seemed to slip past as it always had, before. The fifth chapter he read much more slowly, as time and work permitted, and though lines mostly didn't hit him in the gut as they had in that first week or two, sometimes one managed to slip into his brain. He had a dream about Carson, where they were talking about friendship and saying goodbye, and when he woke up he was sure it had been real. The feeling faded throughout the day, but he still felt oddly cheerful. He dreamed about Carson often, after that, snatches of poetry mixed in with their conversations, but they were no longer nightmares. Once, after a Firefly marathon, Sheppard had turned up as Shepherd Book and held up the thin volume of poetry as though it were a holy book. "_He who was living is now dead,_" he'd said. "_We who were living are now dying, with a little patience._" And then he'd stepped aside, and behind him was Carson's coffin, lid open (although there had been no body, when it had been real) and inside was Carson, smiling at him. He'd pulled himself out of the coffin "just for a wee while," he'd said, and they talked about pirates and quantum mechanics and how stupid Sheppard had been on the last mission. When he woke up, he rolled his eyes at the predictability of _that_ snatch of poetry ending up in his dreams about Carson, and then it occurred to him that maybe his grief was waning. He wasn't sure if he was happy about it, but didn't see what he could do.

They lost Elizabeth, and he re-read the entire thing through the middle of chapter five, but it didn't work. The grief he had for Elizabeth was a different sort, and besides, Elizabeth was like Ford: maybe, someday, they'd get her (him) back. It didn't feel right to grieve—that was giving up.

He became perplexed over the DA riddles, and didn't feel like he'd understood even one word of the section, but didn't feel too badly about it. The world (universe) needed him for more important things than poetry analysis. Soon after he came to this conclusion, the Dedalus arrived again, as it always did, and in it was a package from Kaleb: more poems by Eliot, along with a study guide for _The Wasteland._ "In case you hadn't figured it out yet," Kaleb had written, "here are some ideas. Half of them are probably wrong."

Rodney composed a reply: "Thanks for the poetry, but I've come to the conclusion that I suck at English, especially poetry. One poem is more than enough for me. How's Madison doing? Say hi to Jeannie for me."

Then he looked carefully at the sheet, and crumpled it. Grabbing a new sheet of paper, he wrote, "Thanks for the poetry! I really look forward to reading it. Hope you enjoy my present to you. How's Madison doing? Say hi to Jeannie for me." He enclosed a book on physics—the simplest one he had, though it _was_ a graduate-level text. After he put it in the cart meant for packages and letters to be sent back to Earth, he dashed off a quick e-mail to Jeannie, explaining that he didn't have any simpler books on Atlantis and maybe (if Kaleb was interested, of course) Jeannie could find a somewhat simpler textbook to get him started.

He had a twenty minutes left before he had to leave for a meeting with Sam and John and Radek, and quickly decided that even if he didn't understand poetry, it didn't mean he could never read it. Carson had thought he'd enjoy it, after all, and he did enjoy reading it, even if he didn't enjoy never knowing what it was about. He went out to the balcony (not _that_ balcony, but a balcony) and sat down on the ground, and read

_I sat upon the shore_

_Fishing, with the arid plain behind me_

_Shall I at least set my lands in order?_

and

_These fragments I have shored against my ruins_

and

_Shantih shantih shantih_

--Peace.

Rodney smiled, and shut the book.

* * *

Well...that's it! Let me know how/if you liked/disliked it. :)

-Emilie


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