Gravity, by rheanna27 (PG)

[meansgirl.livejournal.com]

Rec Category: AU
Pairing: McShep, but really it's more gen than shippy.
Categories: Episode tag, friendship, angst, apocafic
Warnings: spoilers through season 4 (in case you're behind, like me)
Author on LJ: rheanna27 
Author's Website: Palimpsest
Link: Gravity
Why This Must Be Read: 
I'm working my way through the beginning of season 5 of SGA at the moment, so I just saw the season 4 finale "The Last Man" pretty recently. I read this fic before I saw the episode, and now that I've watched it and gone back to read the fic again--Wow. I'm not sure if this is technically considered AU, because it explores and expands on something we get a glimpse of in canon. However, it is technically an alternate timeline in the episode, so I think this would count. 

Gravity is a wrenching take on Rodney's A.I. and the thousands of years he spends alone, the hundreds he spends waiting for John to wake from stasis, and the brilliant idea which shows us that yes, even when non-corporeal and based in binary code, John and Rodney are still, well, John and Rodney.

And that's who Rodney misses. He hadn't even realized quite how much until the moment Sheppard walked out of the Stargate, forty-eight thousand years late. 

He monitors the stasis chamber, reflecting bitterly on the irony that Sheppard is just as remote from him now as he was throughout the long millennia spent waiting. He accesses his internal logs—his A.I. equivalent to memory—and replays everything that happened from the second Sheppard came through the wormhole to the moment the stasis field snapped into place around him. Then he goes back further, to the age-blurred memories he inherited from his creator. The clearest of them is a single image of Sheppard, reclining in the command chair in Antarctica, gazing up in surprise at the map of the solar system projected above him, asking, Am I doing that? Rodney had looked at Sheppard and the chair and the projection and back to Sheppard and the thought had come, unbidden and startling, I've found him. At the time, he hadn't even known what it meant. 

He'd known only too well what it meant the second time he'd thought it, years later. This time he'd been staring at a screen as it finished churning through the millions of calculations required to determine how far into the future the wormhole anomaly had flung Sheppard. When the number had popped up in front of Rodney's tired and half-focused eyes, he hadn't even balked at how large it was, how huge a span of time it represented, because at least now heknew. He'd faced down the unknown and quantified it; now he'd defined the problem, all he had to do was solve it. "I've found you," he'd said out loud, and allowed himself a moment to enjoy his triumph. 

Rodney doesn't have a voice anymore—there's no point wasting power on the hologram when there's no one around to see or hear it—but he can still speak, in a way, by expressing his thoughts as data packets which he transmits across the crystalline network in which his consciousness is embedded. //I found you,// he says, directing the burst of data toward the Sheppard database. A single pathway lights up for the briefest instant, then goes dark again. In the silence, Rodney finds himself hoping, irrationally, for a response. 

Of course, there isn't one. 

He considers both the flesh and blood Sheppard who is sleeping in the stasis chamber and the database which holds his mind and memories and dreams and fears, equally frozen. He thinks about how much he would like to talk to Sheppard again. 

That's when he has the idea.