the guy who came in from the cold

Siberia is cold.

Rodney McKay should not be here.

He did not blow up a DHD. He did not endanger a mountain filled with people. His science is not driven by what can only be womanly urges and hair dye. He is a realist who only opens fortune cookies to mock them. Any self-respecting fortune cookie would have been able to predict a trip to Russia.

Take that, you bastard fortune cookies, he thinks as he walks into a closet they tell him is his room.

“This is it?” he complains, getting nothing but an indifferent and grim look from a man of indeterminate and completely irrelevant military rank as he turns away. “Oh, well, thank you. I always wondered what living in the gulag would be like.”

The grim-faced guard turns back to look at Rodney, as if remembering this face.

From personal experience, Rodney knows that people like him are too important to die or be beaten to a pulp, so without fear of retribution or a care in the world, he slams the door to his closet shut on the guard's face, catching a look of surprise that wipes away a previously grim demeanor.

Russia? Rodney McKay has landed.

The Russians speak English and they speak it just fine when they need to. Only, around Rodney, they seem to speak Russian more and in hushed tones. When they do speak in English, it seems with an affectation designed purely to inform Rodney that, “you are mean and nothing like the Mountie who says thank you kindly.”

Rodney considers this an achievement on his part. He's only been around a month and already there is an increase of twenty per cent in brain activity in the people around him as they find ways of countering his personality. How can he not be flattered by this?

“The food here is like the women,” Rodney tells his assistant one day. “Always cold and hard to stomach.”

It causes one scientist to accidentally spill coffee on him and for the chefs to suddenly not remember what dish has lemon in it. On some days, everything has lemon.

Rodney could be irritated that the Russians are putting up a fight against his blunt nature, trying to weaken his reserve, but there is a part of him that is so pissed off with Major Samantha Carter, that he actually welcomes these distractions. It stands to reason that if he's pissed off, everyone else should be too.

“Do you not care even a little bit if people don't like you?” she asks one night, lying in his bed and looking like all fantasies should look, but talking like they shouldn't.

"This totally isn't working," Rodney says glumly and turns away from her.

"We're going to have to talk about this at some point."

Rodney ignores Sam completely, surprising himself by just how angry he still is with her and then baffled as he wonders why.

Two months into his stay, Colonel Chekov informs Rodney that antagonizing other people on the base will not earn him a plane ticket to America. He is effectively a long term loan and the Russians have him until the Americans decide to recall him.

Sam hums Oh Canada in Rodney's ear, all the way back to his quarters. Rodney decides that this will be the year when someone loses faith in their abilities every single day. By the time he's done, the Russians won't even have a Stargate program. They'll just have an inter-galactic portal that used to believe in itself.

One day, he's in the mess, prodding at his food, miserable and missing home – wherever the hell that is – and a diminutive woman takes a seat opposite him, her hair tied tight and her features sharp, skin pale. Rodney frowns at Morticia and wonders if she's new, because no one else would be brave enough to sit with him in this mood. Not even people from his staff. Especially people from his staff.

“Dr. Svetlana Markov,” she says. “You are Dr. Rodney McKay. I have heard much about you.”

Rodney looks around the room and catches the eyes of a few people. Sure, he bets she's heard plenty about him. “Well, I'm afraid I can't say the same,” he lies.

Svetlana nods. “I have been away.”

“Sure, rub it in,” Rodney says. “What happened? Did you sneeze near the Kremlin and they packed you back off to Siberia?”

Svetlana frowns. “I wanted to come back.”

Rodney stares as though he's just seen the sun shining in the middle of the night. “Really? Why?”

Svetlana looks around and gives a small nod. “I like it here.”

Rodney looks around at this dark, depressing hell made of concrete. Then he looks at her. Then he understands why she's sitting with him. This woman is clearly insane.

“I like her,” Sam says with a grin, but Rodney's still not talking to her.

He sees Svetlana a lot. She's always in the thick of things and annoyingly enough, offering her opinions on everything. If it was just work, that would be fine, but no, she has to talk about other things too and Rodney is too busy to listen because he has to figure out a way to use the Russian gate to somehow connect with the one in Cheyenne and then turn it into a marshmallow. Fix that, Blondie!

Svetlana joins him in the corridor. She joins him in the mess at lunch. And sometimes they're talking out of office hours, when she could stop talking to him. It's not like he'd even mind.

He just hates the fact that she possesses a shield to ward off his pre-emptive sniping.

Then he wonders why Carter couldn't have been that way.

“My friend was trapped in the Stargate,” she tells him that night. “I thought I was going to lose him.”

“Oh,” Rodney replies quietly, thinking about Samantha Carter stuck in the buffer of a Stargate and him heroically trying to get her out.

“You wouldn't be so lonely if you slowed down enough to make friends,” Sam says one day, making him regret that he is unable to shut her away in some corner of his brain forever.

Rodney continues to stare at the simulation on his laptop, taking a gulp of hot coffee.

“I mean, you go charging in, loud, arrogant, rude-”

“Shut up, please,” Rodney says, holding up a hand and taking a moment to appreciate Sam's tight T-shirt. “Your only function here is to look hot. Not to yap my ear off, thank you very much.”

Sam shrugs. “But, you obviously want me to yap your ear off.”

“I totally do not want you!” Rodney blinks and flounders. “To yap anything off!”

Sam is suddenly by his side and Rodney finds himself moving away, eyeing her suspiciously as she watches him with such intent that he thinks his head will just open up at the center and be laid bare.

“Why am I even here?” Sam asks quietly. “I mean, if you hate me so much. Why?”

“You are here purely for my recreational, um, amusement...” Sam narrows her eyes at him and he frowns. “What?”

“You wouldn't be so lonely if you let people be your friends,” she says and he's pretty sure they're not even her words. They sound like old words from a long time ago. Words he didn't appreciate then and doesn't appreciate now.

Though he knows that Sam can go wherever he does, he gets up and turns his back on her, storming out of his lab, pissed off all the way to his quarters, where he stands and glares at his wall of certificates.

Some time later, there's a knock at the door and Svetlana is there with a file in her hand and a question on her lips.

Out of spite to Sam, Rodney decides he'll be real nice to Svetlana for the rest of the day. Or at least until she says something glaringly moronic.

“Why must you be so difficult?” Svetlana asks, obviously unaware of a bitter winter raging outside.

“Oh, I don't know, I guess I find bumbling idiots distracting?” he says, having no effect on Svetlana who has anti-snipe skin and is sipping snipe-protection tea.

“You hate Russia,” she says matter-of-factly.

Rodney rolls his eyes. “Well, of course I do. I hate the food. I hate the weather. I hate the bureaucracy, did I mention I hate the food?”

“Not for the first time,” Svetlana says. “But you see, I like Russia. Not everyone has a favorable view of my country, but I like it. It is my home. Many of us like it.”

Rodney snorts. “So?”

Svetlana watches him carefully. “Sometimes you make it difficult to continue liking it.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. I had no idea I was raining on your parade. I'd leave and let you all be happy if it wasn't for the fact that my contract stipulates my employers can jerk me around for another two years,” Rodney snaps, because, hey, surely the least he is allowed to do is be mad. Which he is. God, he is.

“Perhaps you hate something else and it is easier to hate Russia,” Svetlana says calmly, while Sam sits next to her, eating blue jell-o.

Rodney scowls. “I hate the cold. I would never voluntarily work somewhere where it's always cold.”

“It is warm in here,” Svetlana says.

“Well, it's cold outside,” Rodney says stubbornly.

“But, you are not outside,” Svetlana counters evenly.

Yes, I am, Rodney thinks and wishes Sam away.

“You know, if you weren't so busy building a wall of noise around you, maybe it would give people a chance to like you,” Sam says as he's getting changed.

“Spare me the psychoanalysis, please,” Rodney replies, buttoning his shirt.

“You can be a little overbearing, it's all I'm saying.”

Rodney sighs and turns to look at her. “Maybe...”

“Ha!” Sam says, pointing at Rodney's nose. “I knew it!”

“Fine!” Rodney snaps back. “So, maybe I was a little abrasive the first time we met. Forgive me for not bowing down to the splendor that is you.”

“Oh please,” Sam says, sounding nothing like herself. “You were looking to meet someone you idolized and found a hot blonde scientist. And I mean really hot. You figure, hey, I don't have a shot at her, so I'll just be a jerk instead. That'll have her falling at my feet.”

Rodney's mouth falls open as he stares. How can he be so hard on himself? It doesn't seem right. “You know what? You are not that hot!”

Sam rolls her eyes. “Some apology.”

Rodney points at Sam. “That ship has passed.”

One day, Rodney is walking down a corridor, headed to Svetlana's lab. The door is open and the interior is quite dim even with the lights on and blinking machines. She is leaning on an elbow at the table, hand massaging her neck as she reads over a document, her other hand tapping a pen.

Her hair is a mass of black, full and loose over her shoulders. Rodney frowns because he's seen Svetlana's neck every day for months now, bare and long with hair tied tight at the top and now that it's partially covered by her hair, allowing the smallest of glimpses, he can't take his eyes off the pale of her skin.

Rodney figures that Svetlana started looking beautiful way before now. This is just a eureka moment. Just like the fact that it's been spring for a while, but he's only just realized it.

Svetlana notices him and smiles, getting up and closing the file she was reading. Rodney finds himself smiling, feeling a little unbalanced all of a sudden.

How do women do that? Why is it that the moment you realize how hot they are, you lose all higher brain functions? Maybe it's the breasts, though, if he thinks about it, he can't remember Svetlana having breasts before this moment.

Typical. The iron curtain comes down and Rodney McKay instantly loses the use of his brain.

“I want to talk to you about something over lunch,” Svetlana says, gathering her hair up to tie it.

“Leave it,” Rodney says, immediately regretting his lack of brain/mouth connection. “Um, I mean, doesn't your head hurt with your hair like that? I'm surprised you're not going bald. And what is with this weather? I think my nipples have frostbite.”

Oh, nice recovery, he groans inwardly, while Sam appears just to give him a look that suggests she thinks he's an idiot. So, nothing new there.

“It is Siberia,” Svetlana says, matter-of-fact, shaking her head with a smile and pulling her hair into a ponytail.

Has she ever had a ponytail before? He can't remember. Maybe she has. It doesn't matter anymore though, because now she's not just Svetlana. She's hot.

“So, what do you think about Markov?” Rodney asks Sam that night.

“I don't think. I'm not really here,” Sam says. “Maybe you should discuss it with someone more, oh, I dunno, real?”

Rodney stares up at the ceiling. “Huh.”

It's difficult approaching the Svetlana situation. He can go in, all bluster and full of himself, so when she knocks him back he has something to fall on. Or he could go in and make an ass of himself and still be knocked back. Either way, it seems like a dangerous situation.

He realizes how dangerous when in the middle of a conversation he wonders if he should just kiss her. He ends up staring at her mouth until she asks him if he's okay and he tells her that he's so cold he's having a stroke.

She takes him to the mess and gets him a coffee. It's funny how he forgets that it's always so cold outside.

“You know, to be completely fair, McKay, you did rub me up the wrong way,” Sam says, somewhere at the nape of Rodney's neck.

“Well, I guess that makes it okay for you to have me sent to Siberia,” Rodney says sarcastically.

“You honestly think I have the power to do that?”

“Oh please, like you don't have everyone at the SGC eating out of your flaxen, goddess-like hair,” Rodney mutters, shamelessly pouting.

“Goddess-like?”

“Shut up.”

“Look, doesn't it seem more reasonable that they sent you to Siberia because after me, you're the most capable of building the naquadah generator?”

Rodney sits up and turns to look at her in his bed. She's not even considerate enough to be wearing something naked. “After you? Give me a break! You might be the golden girl of the SGC, but that'll change when your lunatic science wipes Colorado off the map and you have all the time in the world to work on your hair!”

Sam smiles up at him and nods. “Yep. Real classy, McKay.”

Rodney goes back to hating her. It's so much easier than trying to understand what the hell happened in the first place.

“So, um, what do you think about Markov?” Rodney casually asks one of his staff, some guy with an unpronounceable name and gray eyes.

He looks up slowly and frowns. “Well, she is a very good scientist.”

Rodney nods impatiently. “Yes, but what do you think about her?”

The other man stares at Rodney and makes him wonder if he naturally attracts socially retarded people like himself. “Why? Has she done something?”

Rodney shakes his head. “Forget it. I'll go talk to a vending machine if I want an intelligent conversation.”

He gets a frown in return, before the other man goes back to work and Sam settles herself on the edge of the table.

“I think she's nice,” Sam says.

“Well, I wasn't asking you,” Rodney thinks.

“Pretty too,” Sam says with a nod.

Rodney sighs and closes his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose, opening his eyes to find Sam looking at him with something that could be concern.

Rodney gives her a resentful look, still stinging over a million things. But she's...so hard to keep hating that he ends up hating himself.

“Please leave me alone,” he thinks.

And she looks the way she did when he saw her last, on his way out of the briefing room and towards Russia. Not exactly sorry to see him go.

Rodney's not the kind of person who is wired to comfort people. Usually, he's the reason people need comfort to begin with.

But as is the way, unpleasant things naturally gravitate towards him.

He's walking into a lab to whine at someone and find out why the test results for the buffer re-sequencing weren't in his hand an hour ago. He's got a whole thing going on in his head, about how maybe they should forget building naquadah generators and just have a slumber party.

Only, he doesn't get to use it because Yana Belova is crying. Belova is blonde and blue-eyed and Rodney would probably hit on her if she didn't work for him. And then she'd probably be sitting there crying like she is.

He turns around to leave, trying not to panic, only to face Sam, who is standing there, arms folded across chest, making her cleavage look even more impressive.

Sam rolls her eyes. “Don't you think you should say something? That's a member of your staff.”

“Hi, I'm a physicist, which you must be confusing with Oprah,” Rodney says, walking into the corridor.

“Don't you even care?” Sam asks.

Rodney gives her an exasperated look. “Look, I appreciate you being all Jiminy Cricket, but seriously, anything I say will only make it worse.”

Sam shrugs. “So? Try anyway.”

Rodney mutters under his breath, rolls his eyes and all but stomps into the lab. “Belova, do you have those results I asked for?”

Belova looks up, blotchy-faced and red-eyed. “Dr. McKay, yes, of course, one moment.”

He watches her shuffle around, looking through files on her desk, sniffing, while Rodney tries not to wring his hands as he figures out how to start the comforting.

Belova stops searching and wipes her nose with the back of her hand. “I am sure it was here. Perhaps if you will give me a moment to find it,” she says, looking utterly miserable.

Rodney considers telling her to forget the results, forget them forever, but then he decides to suck it up. “Uh, look, I don't want to pry, but, are you okay? It's just that, you don't seem okay.”

Belova nods, “I am fine, Dr. McKay.”

Of course, it's a pointless lie, because then she's crying into her hand again and Rodney really wishes he was somewhere else.

He walks up to her and carefully reaches out, patting her on the shoulder. Somehow, she ends up wrapped around him, sobbing into his chest, while he's figuring out where his hands should go. He finally settles on holding her loosely and scowling at the dampness seeping through his shirt.

“He was special,” Belova says a few minutes later, as they sit at her desk. “I did not think it was his time yet.”

Rodney nods with understanding since there's not much else he can do.

“I did not think it would hurt this much,” Belova says, still sniffing. “All these tears. Over a cat. But...my poor Kushka.”

“Kushka?”

“That was her name.”

“Doesn't that mean-?”

“Cat. Yes.”

“Oh.” Rodney watches her for a minute. “Well...they do say that time heals all wounds,” he says, giving her an awkward pat on the hand. “Although, they are usually wrong about a lot of things. I mean, my dog ran away when I was a kid and I still get...but we're not talking about me. Did I mention I have a cat?”

Belova shakes her head. “No.”

Rodney smiles happily. “I wasn't allowed to bring him with me, so I had to leave him with my neighbor. Which is okay, because she's old and has about twenty cats and loves them all very much. But still, I do miss the little guy.”

“What is his name?”

“Spot,” Rodney says, rather proud of himself.

Belova smiles, knowingly. “Like Data's cat from Star Trek?”

Rodney feels a ray of sunshine on this bleak day and snaps his fingers at Belova. “Yes. Precisely. You watch the show.”

“I am very big fan of the franchise,” Belova says with a nod and looks much happier than before.

Well, wow, Rodney thinks, look at that, a smiling Belova, no longer crying over dead Kushka the cat.

Then it occurs to him that Belova is very much a real person.

“So, um, Yana. What do you think about Markov?”

“They sent you because they could hardly send me, could they?” Sam says in the quiet of the night.

“Right,” Rodney says, staring at the dark ceiling.

“I mean, I kind of have a job on SG-1,” Sam added.

“Which makes you less expendable than everyone else.”

“You're a smart guy. It's why you're here. There wasn't anyone else they could send,” Sam reasons.

“I know that. It's just...”

“What?”

“You didn't have to look so pleased about it.”

“McKay, you called me a du-”

“Okay, sleeping now!” Rodney says, shutting his eyes tight and pulling the covers around him.

The last thing Rodney expects of himself is to get mad because people are suddenly being nice to him or generally putting up with his bullshit.

In the mess, the grouchiest of the lunch ladies goes out of her way to let Rodney know what has lemon in it. For a minute he suspects foul play, but then she gives him this little smile and Rodney's too confused to ask her if she's plotting to poison him.

His staff are good natured about some of his tantrums and plain ignore the rest. They don't even seem annoyed.

Svetlana sees him in passing and gives him this pleased smile, like he's won a war.

It makes him want to yell at everyone that contrary to popular belief, he's never really been that big of an asshole and even he has the ability to be mildly human on occasion.

“Look, shut up and listen,” Rodney says, just as Sam opens her mouth. “So, I came on a little strong, regrettable things were said, which I now...well, regret, so...sorry.”

Sam shakes her head. “Worst apology ever.”

“Well, I could write it in blood of it makes you happy,” Rodney says with a curl of his lip. “Anyway, it's your turn now.”

“Me? What for?”

Rodney motions to his small quarters. “Did you think I was waiting for the right opportunity to come to Siberia? A childhood ambition maybe?”

“You mean you don't like it here?”

Rodney glares with the power of a million nukes.

“How is your being in Siberia my fault?” Sam asks.

“You have got to be kidding me!” Rodney says, hitting the high notes. “Are you serious?”

Sam nods. “Completely.”

Rodney steps close and points at her nose. “I am here because your cronies couldn't hack someone criticizing your crazy science!”

“You called me a dumb blonde!”

“You called me a jerk first!”

“Because you put a deadline on my friend's life,” Sam says evenly.

“I was doing my job,” Rodney snaps. “I was the voice of reason, damn it!”

Sam nods. “Yes you were. But the voice of reason...didn't work. Did it?”

Rodney steps away. That is cold. Even for a figment of his own imagination, that is cold.

He sighs, shoulders sagging as he drops on the edge of his bed, a trickle of Chopin playing in his head. Badly.

“It's not Russia,” Rodney tells Svetlana, turning up at her doorstep in the evening. “Well, it is, but, not specifically.”

Svetlana frowns from where she's standing in her doorway. “What is not Russia?”

Rodney takes a deep breath before getting annoyed, though, for once, he'd like it if he wasn't the only one that had a memory recall of more than seven seconds.

“I don't hate Russia,” he says. “Don't get me wrong, it's not exactly on top of my list of places I'd like to work either, but I don't hate it.”

“But, that is what you said. You said you hated it,” Svetlana says simply.

Great, now she remembers. Typical.

“Well, wouldn't you hate it too if someone forced you to work here? Hey, I was happy where I was working, but no, a bunch of people with obvious god complexes had to wield their mighty hammer and throw me down from the mountain into the cold,” Rodney says, with a mini-flourish of his hand. “Look, what I'm trying to say is that it's not the weather, though it's pretty crappy weather, and it's not the people, though you're all kind of scary and it's not--”

“I am glad they sent you,” Svetlana says with a small smile, one that's too gentle for Rodney's liking. He doesn't know what to do with gentle.

Rodney frowns, his mouth opening and searching for the right word. “Huh?”

Svetlana steps forward and reaches up to kiss him on the cheek, her lips leaving a warm imprint.

“Oh,” Rodney says.

“For an observant man, you are not very observant at all,” she says quietly.

Rodney touches his face where she kissed him. “I think I'd have to agree with you on that.”

Dinner is arranged for pyatnitsa, or Friday, as Rodney still calls it. The days leading up to it are filled with less than discreet smiles and lame jokes on Rodney's part, after which he usually rolls his eyes at himself.

Siberia is still cold, but Rodney doesn't mind it so much.

“You know, I really am sorry,” he says quietly, the night swallowing up his apology. “I, uh, I was-”

“Mean,” Sam says. “You were mean.”

“Yes. Yes I was. It's just that...well, you...” Rodney trails off. “You know, I can't seem to stop thinking about you and I think I should.”

Sam leans over him and smiles, like she would if they could meet all over again and he could be someone else. She presses a kiss to his cheek, where Rodney can still feel Svetlana's lips.

And then she's gone, like she was never there. Rodney sighs and closes his eyes.

Come Friday, Rodney stands in front of the mirror, fingering his newly cut hair before pulling on his jacket, and brushing down his shirt and pants. Then he points his finger at his reflection, cocking the thumb like a gun and clicking his tongue as he winks.

However, when he opens his door, Svetlana is right there. He doesn't want to be a pig about the whole thing, but he seems to be the one that's gone to any trouble to clean up for the date. She has her hair up in a bun and is wearing a bulky black fleece with jeans. Seriously, she could have made some effort.

“Um, hello,” Rodney says, instead of asking her if she's dumping him before the date,

“I just saw Colonel Chekov,” Svetlana says. “He was sending someone to get you, but I said I would do it.”

“What's going on?” Rodney asks, his stomach doing a little flip flop.

“The SGC just called. They have a situation with the Stargate. You have been requested to return,” Svetlana says, tilting her head a little and smiling with what looks like a little regret.

“You have got to be kidding me! We had a date!” Rodney whines, which makes Svetlana smile just that bit more.

“No. I am not kidding,” Svetlana says. “There is a plane waiting.”

“I have to go right now?” Rodney asks quietly.

“Yes. Immediately. Come,” Svetlana says, holding out her hand, which Rodney takes.

They walk down the corridor, hand in hand and Rodney feels an odd reluctance at having to leave this place, though he's been waiting to leave it forever. The corridors of the SGC feel much colder in his memory.

“Do you think you will be back?” Svetlana asks.

“Well, considering the high crisis rate of the SGC, I doubt it. Besides, knowing my luck they'll probably send me to the North Pole next.”

There's a guard waiting at the end of the corridor and Svetlana stops walking. “I am afraid my goodbye will have to be here.”

Rodney scowls. “Right. Uh, look, I want to...I...I don't know what to say.”

Svetlana smiles and shrugs. “Goodbye perhaps?”

Rodney gives a nod. “This really sucks.”

Svetlana laughs and reaches up to kiss him and he wants to do something from the movies, like grabbing her around the waist and kissing her hard like a big hero. But he's not a big hero and there's a possibility that Svetlana would punch him if he gave her tongue without warning, so he kisses her back on the cheek and gives her a smile.

They look away awkwardly before Svetlana nods towards the guard, letting Rodney know it's time to leave with a smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes.

He feels the squeeze of her hand before she lets go and then he's walking away, caught between wanting to stay, the warmth of Svetlana's hand still wrapped around his, and wanting to leave, to go back to everything that's familiar.

Only, everything here is familiar too, now. And it's not so cold in Siberia. Not once you're inside.

- the end -