Every Day

by Aelfgyfu

Rodney McKay sat slumped down in the chair he had pushed away from hers, legs crossed at the ankles, arms folded across his chest with fists tucked under the arms, head down—almost the poster boy for closed-off body language. "I don't even know why I'm here," he groused. "I'm fine. I mean, as fine as I can be, under—as fine as I get." His jaw jutted out a little with the self-correction and he looked up, challenging her.

Kate Heightmeyer felt some relief at the challenge. When she was younger, first starting, she'd have treated it as a contest. Treat the patient who doesn't want to be treated, help the one who doesn't want to be helped. It took a couple of years to realize that she was doing that. She found very little danger of slipping back into that trap on Atlantis. She knew everyone. They mattered to her, not as challenges, but as people.

But if Rodney McKay didn't try to challenge her, she'd be more worried than she already was.

"Fine. So you're...." She left a little pause, knowing he often didn't even need that to interrupt.

"So, I'm working, I'm working well—brilliantly, in fact; did anyone tell you any different?—I'm fine, everything's...fine." The words petered out unexpectedly. He frowned suspiciously at her.

Rodney McKay wasn't like most patients. He told her proudly in his second appointment with her that he didn't "do subtle." It wasn't exactly true; he often picked up small nuances, but much of the time, he misconstrued their meaning. As he had said, however, he did not respond well to gentle nudges. He'd told her that he could take anything she could dish out—clearly he saw counseling as a competition. He really did want her to be direct and honest; most patients said that, but few meant it, or realized what it entailed.

"You're still grieving for Doctor Beckett," she said bluntly.

"Nope." A little smile crossed his face, but his body language didn't otherwise change. "That whole stages of grief thing? Yeah. I've arrived at acceptance."

That wasn't good. "You're familiar with the Stages of Grief?"

"Sure." He was looking almost smug.

"The Kübler-Ross model?"

"Yeah. You know, you don't need an advanced degree in head-shrinking, or whatever it is you call what you do, to be able to read this stuff."

"So what did you read? The original Kübler-Ross work is a bit dated now. The Yale Bereavement study?" Serve.

He frowned, dropped his gaze from her face. "No, I, um...."

"Something a little less clinical, more self-help? Some people find Harold Smith very helpful, though he does draw heavily on Judeo-Christian—" Set.

"No, um, I—"

"Looked it up on the Internet while you were back on Earth?" Spike.

Rodney straightened angrily. Score.

"No! Look, I had some psych in school. I had to take something in social sciences." He scowled and slid a little back towards his previous position, but he kept his eyes on her face.

Kate suspected she didn't have to explain it all, but she did so anyway. "Kübler-Ross described some of the stages of receiving catastrophic news. She never claimed these were the only ones, or that they followed this exact sequence, or that people went through each stage once and only once. You were taught a simplified version. Many people go through stages out of order, skip or repeat stages, or go through variations on the ones she identified."

"Oh, great! You mean I have to go through some of those other parts again?" He was too loud, but he didn't accompany his outburst with any gestures.

Bluster, pure bluster, she was certain now. He had already known he was oversimplifying matters. So why bring up the stages himself? He must have wanted her to call him on it.

"You don't really expect me to believe that you forgot that," she said gently.

He shrugged. "Well, when I need your help working back through some of these stages, I'll let you know." He straightened again and uncrossed his legs, apparently to stand.

Kate held up a hand. "You just got here. You've got my undivided attention." She smiled. "For a full hour." He often pretended to leave early, but he never did.

He relaxed his weight back into the chair. "Why? Did somebody complain about me? Because I've been doing my work!"

Kate shook her head. "No one complained," she said, trying not to put too much emphasis on the verb. People had been talking about him, but not complaining, for once, which had her as concerned as some of Rodney's friends. "You've been through a lot. Everyone on Atlantis has. That's why everyone has sessions with me."

"Yeah, that must keep you pretty busy." He gathered his feet under him again, as if to rise, but she only had to look pointedly at him for him to lean back into the chair again. "There's lots of people who need more help than me. I mean, Teyla just had her mind invaded by a Wraith Queen! A hungry, angry—really, really hungry, really angry Wraith Queen. And...."

"So you've spoken to Teyla about this?" Catch him off guard, get him to talk about his friends—that might help get past those obstacles he kept throwing in front of her.

The change in gears obviously confused Rodney, got him off his digression. "No. I mean, a little, but.... Hasn't she talked to you?"

"Oh, I talk to Teyla." She smiled reassuringly. "We aren't here to talk about Teyla."

Rodney frowned deeper. "Did Teyla talk about me? Oh, that's what this is about, isn't it?"

Kate should have expected that reaction, but she hadn't. The truth was that Teyla had mentioned Rodney. So had John Sheppard. So, amazingly, had Ronon Dex, whom Elizabeth required to come but who usually spent his sessions looking out the window or asking her questions about Earth and its cultures. Or telling her stories meant to shock her, when he was angry.

Rodney continued, "Well, I don't know what she told you, but I—oh, hell, she told you what a screw-up I am, didn't she?" He shifted sideways as much as the chair would allow, looking towards the window.

Another reaction Kate hadn't anticipated; she wasn't at the top of her game today. "Why would she tell me that?"

"Because I didn't listen to her! Because not even a month after my best friend died when I wouldn't go fishing with him, even though I knew it meant a lot to him, my—my teammate tells me there's a Wraith on the station, and I tell her she's just—succumbing to the pressure!" He shifted again, facing forwards and tucking his feet up against the lower part of the chair. "Water pressure, I mean. Not just stress. Though God knows we've had enough of that. And—and I didn't listen when Graydon told me his name—I argued with him about his own name, for God's sake!—and now he's dead, and Dickenson, now he's dead too, and I got his name wrong too; they just—if I'd listened to Teyla, maybe she wouldn't have been doing her stupid Jedi mind trick, and the Wraith wouldn't have gotten to her, and the thing wouldn't have gotten on the station!"

Kate knew that the two men had died on the underwater drilling platform just two days earlier, and she was sure that that had added to Rodney's burdens, but she had had no idea that he blamed himself. As if he needed more casualties on his imaginary tally. "So you think it's your fault for not listening?"

"Of course! I—well, maybe it wouldn't have made any difference. Maybe. We couldn't detect any Wraith. I tried." He spread his hands wide in front of him, as if to show that he had nothing to hide. "I really did, even though I didn't believe her." He let his head flop back and regarded the ceiling. "I tried so that I could show her she was wrong. And that I was right, of course. We couldn't detect any." His head snapped back down. "Except that maybe it should have occurred to me that the damn Wraith wasn't on the station. If I'd thought of that, we could have kept it out, killed it before it did any harm." He stared at the floor.

Kate took a deep breath, waiting. Rodney often started up again on his own. Not this time, however. "Any particular reason why you think now that you should have thought of it? Other than hindsight?" She kept her tone neutral.

"Because I'm a genius." He looked at her with disgust. "I know everybody thinks I'm just full of myself, but let's face it, when there's a crisis, when some system goes wrong, when some bomb goes off and nobody knows why or even where it was—they call me! And I figure it out! Because I'm a genius!"

"You do," Kate agreed, trying to bring his focus back to his actions rather than his self-definition. "You do figure things out." Thank God, or they'd all have been killed many times over. Except that some of them got killed anyway....

Rodney looked back at her helplessly, his head ducked again, barely keeping his eyes on her face. "So why didn't I?" he finally broke the silence, almost whispering.

"Did you know there was a problem?"

"No. I mean yes!" he said loudly. "Teyla thought there was a problem. So I knew there was a problem. I just thought it was her. In her head...." He waved a finger vaguely towards his own head. He was getting quieter and quieter, looking down at the floor again. Then he looked back up. "I didn't think it was my problem, so I didn't do anything. I ran standard checks, then I went back to...you know, getting things going. The stuff—the stuff I wanted to do. The stuff that's, you know, interesting."

He stared at the floor again, and, after a decent interval, Kate asked, "So why do you blame yourself for those men's deaths?"

"Haven't you been listening?" Rodney asked angrily. "I misanalyzed the problem! I thought it was her problem, I thought it was in her head, so I let it go. I mean, that's your territory." He made the statement sound insulting, but she was used to that. "When really it was my problem, it was a problem of what I could and couldn't detect, where I was and wasn't looking, and I could have kept that thing from getting onto the station! From killing Graydon and Dickenson! And nearly killing everybody!"

"But you did prevent it from killing everybody. You helped stop the self-destruct."

"What?" His voice went up an octave. "Who the hell have you been talking to? Teyla tricked the Wraith into stopping the self-destruct by implanting a false memory in her own mind, for God's sake! I just stood there and waited for a chance to shoot it, and then I couldn't even kill it! I had a P90; Sheppard had a handgun! And he killed it! I didn't do one damned thing! Except walk all the way to the Wraith ship. And complain." He smiled without amusement. "I'm really good at that." He seemed about to say something more, but he stopped.

Teyla had come for a session shortly after they returned from the drilling platform, but she seemed to have left out part of the story that day. And John hadn't been to see her at all in how long?—not counting the last time he'd dropped by to tell her to talk to McKay. Anger flared in Kate for a moment—anger at the Wraith, anger at so many people hurting. And maybe not anger, but frustration that these warrior types felt they had to keep it inside, even long after she felt she had won their trust.

She bit down on the anger and frustration. "So with hindsight, you think you should have known to check the outside of an underwater platform under...intense pressure. Pressure so great you didn't think any but marine life could tolerate it."

Rodney huffed, "Well, when you put it that way, you make it sound just stupid. I can't win! I'm stupid that I didn't think of it in the first place, and I'm stupid now to think I should have!"

Kate couldn't help but smile. "The obvious solution is to give up the idea that you should have thought of it right away."

"Well, yeah, but the obvious solution is usually the wrong solution. Well, often, anyway." He shifted around some more in his seat. "I mean, that a person would be made into a bomb—that's about as far from obvious as you can get." As she knew, it wasn't really the drilling platform incident that most disturbed Rodney.

Kate leaned forward a little, not wanting to miss anything, no matter how small. Rodney had talked a lot about Carson. He had talked about not going fishing. He had been avoiding talk of the Ancients turning people into bombs, and she hadn't pressed—they had plenty of other things to discuss. "What was the obvious solution under those circumstances?"

Rodney's forehead furrowed. "Well, I ran through a whole bunch of hypotheses really fast. The most obvious was some kind of suicide bombing—we didn't have a motive, but motive isn't my concern anyway. And we did have a person at the center of the blast, but there wasn't enough...we didn't find any bomb components. No metal or plastic fragments. Just traces of the chemicals." He looked down at his hands. "I figured it out," he said very quietly. "I just figured it out too late."

Kate sat still, afraid to interrupt. But he didn't continue, and finally she had to ask, "What do you mean, 'too late'? Jim Watson is alive because of you." And Jim was now seeing her every third day, but he would pull through this. "All the patients and...nearly all the medical staff survived because you figured it out and Carson isolated the explosive."

He stared at her with disappointment. She must be failing to see something.

"Look," she continued. "We've already talked about how your backing out of the fishing trip didn't kill Carson."

He shook his head dismissively. "Ronon the Barbarian could convince me of that!"

Recourse to insults—a positive sign for Rodney McKay.

"Ronon's right, and you're right," he continued with a sigh. "They'd have recalled us. Carson would have been back in the infirmary in time for the explosion, but not in time to get the bomb out of him; I wouldn't even have had time to get as far as I did in figuring out the whole...mess.

"That's not where I screwed up. I realized that Hewston had exploded—not a bomb on her, but that she had exploded. I knew Watson had been with her and they were both exposed to some stupid, stupid Atlantis machine. And what did I do? Did I immediately put out the all-call for Watson? No! I called Sheppard and Zelenka to admire my analysis!"

"So you think if you had called sooner for Watson's location—"

"If I had found out sooner where Watson was, and Carson had done his whole hero thing two minutes, maybe even a minute sooner, then that explosive would have been in the containment vessel and Carson—" he broke off, folding his arms hard across his chest and squeezing his eyes shut.

Rodney had indeed been through this stage already; today he was just exhibiting a new variation. One couldn't find this stage on the Kübler-Ross scale; anger came close, but "self-flagellation" wasn't actually listed. He'd been in this mode off and on for over three weeks now. Time for something drastic.

She calmly asked, "And if Doctor Beckett had studied the test results more closely"—Rodney's eyes snapped open—"when Watson and Hewston first went to his infirmary, could he—"

"That's not fair!" Rodney stabbed a finger at her. "Carson made sure they weren't hurt! They didn't show any symptoms, but he was going to re-examine them anyway! He told them to come back in twenty-four hours! He couldn't know!"

Kate said nothing, just relaxed a little in her seat and waited for him to fill in the blanks.

He laughed softly, but his face remained angry. "Okay, I see what you're doing here. You're saying that Carson couldn't have known they'd blow up, so why should I have located Watson faster? Just because I knew he was a bomb, and Carson had no reason to think there was anything wrong...."

Kate shook her head. "No, that's not my point. Carson couldn't have known—"

He cut her off again. "That's right. Carson couldn't have known what the technology did. Because that's my job."

"—because it was unpredictable! As so many things on Atlantis are! Just as you couldn't predict when the next bomb would go off, or even what the best course of action was. What if you had located Jim Watson before Sheppard had military personnel ready to handle the situation? What if you had told him and Jim had run in fear, or others had—?"

"No, no, no," Rodney said dismissively. "I just had to locate him. That's all I had to do. Except that I waited for—"

"You're determined to blame yourself, aren't you?" she asked.

"I wouldn't say determined. It's not like I'm looking around—"

"It's exactly like you're looking around for blame." Kate didn't often interrupt patients, but sometimes it was the only way to get Rodney's attention. "First you blame yourself that you didn't go fishing with Carson. Then you blame yourself that you didn't believe Teyla. Now you blame yourself that you didn't start a search for Watson before you conferred with the head of Atlantis's military and your own right-hand man." She was leaving out a few other things he'd found to blame himself for, but she figured she had the highlights.

"Zelenka's my right-hand man?" A smile flashed across Rodney's face. "Could you tell him that? He'll never believe me. I think he thinks I'm his."

"You think that you should be able to stop everything that goes wrong on Atlantis?" Kate continued, ignoring the interruption.

The smile was gone already. "No, just the problems that have to do with technology!"

"You think you should make no mistakes. Unlike the rest of us." She hadn't meant to use the first-person pronoun. Some patients reacted well to psychologists sharing a little of their own experience with them. Rodney tended to see it as one-upmanship, and neither would win if they started arguing over their errors over the last three years.

"Well, yeah." Rodney's chin was jutting out again, daring her, but he didn't ask her about her mistakes.

"So we all make mistakes, and the great Rodney McKay doesn't." She couldn't quite believe she was doing this to a patient. Taunting—a skill she never learned in her coursework.

"Well, see, that's the problem!" He threw his hands above his head. "I do! And people die! And I destroyed a solar system once," he added.

They had made quite a lot of progress since Rodney's initial insistence that he was fine, Kate knew. How far should she push him?

"And no one else makes mistakes that cause people to die?" she challenged. "Doctor Weir?" Rodney shrugged. "Colonel Sheppard?" He frowned, and he started to move his arms, so she could feel a fight coming. Before he could do more than open his mouth, she played her trump card. "Carson Beckett? How about his Wraith-DNA exper—"

That had him on his feet. "What is it with you? Why the hell are you blaming Beckett?" McKay was standing over her, leaning down just a little to shout in her face.

She looked up at him and waited for him to get it, hoping he wouldn't recall her own role in the disasters with Michael and his kind right now. That would only lead them away from what Rodney needed to talk about most.

He backed off, even turning away to walk a few steps. "Okay, okay." He waved at her. "You're not really blaming Carson. You're trying to...trying to get me to see that everybody makes mistakes. I know that," he said, turning back to face her. "But it doesn't make any damned difference to know that! Because my mistakes killed my best friend! Or at least, I could have prevented his death! But it doesn't even end there! I thought, okay, I really, really screwed up"—she could hear the pain in his voice, raw like she hadn't heard it in any of her previous sessions with him—"but the least I can do, what Carson would want, is to learn from it. Learn not to screw up the same damned way again, to listen to my friends...." He turned his back to her. She could see a slight trembling in his shoulders.

Oh, God. Rodney McKay was either crying or just about to. Crying patients she could usually handle. A crying Rodney McKay, though? She wasn't sure what to do. Many people wanted a comforting touch. Some wanted her to back off. She wasn't sure which one Rodney was. He talked so much, she knew so much about him—and yet most of what he said kept people at a distance, rather than allowing them to get to know him.

"I didn't listen to Teyla! I didn't learn anything!" He sniffled while Kate sat there uncertainly. "She could have died! Everyone on that platform could have died, everyone on this station! And two men did die! And I told Carson—I mean, I know he's dead, but I promised him I—I wouldn't make the same mistake again. And I did. I didn't even waste much time before...."

She stood, and Rodney must have heard her, because he put out his right arm and waved a hand blindly behind him to keep her at bay. He took two more steps and leaned against the wall, his back still to her.

She sat back down and waited for him to say something more. He sniffled, and then again. But he was silent.

"You can't just promise to stop making mistakes," Kate said at last. "I mean..." she hesitated but then plunged ahead. She'd promised Rodney long ago that she'd be honest, and she had never regretted speaking plainly with him. Working with Rodney was never easy, but she had come to have a deep respect for him (though it took several months after she heard that he had been camouflaging his visits to her by pretending they were dating). "Can you imagine trying to convince Carson that you were really going to listen? How many times do you think you'd find yourself interrupting him and yelling at him to make him believe you?"

Rodney's shoulders shook again, and she held her breath, waiting to see which way he would go. "He wouldn't argue. He'd just give me that little smile and nod, and he'd say, 'Of course, Rodney,' and he wouldn't believe me at all," he said at last, sniffling a little more, but with a chuckle mixed in.

He turned back to her. No tears had fallen. "I'm not—I don't even know how to be a friend," he said. "Carson—I thought we were, I dunno, kinda misfits together. No social life, couple of geeks." He grimaced. "And it was only after he was gone I realized—everybody loves Carson. He wasn't a...misfit at all! He knew exactly what to say, or what to do, when you were sick or hurt. He...he made things better. He was—he was a good friend And me, I just...at best, maybe I fix some crisis. At worst, I create it. And I don't even know how to be a friend properly. Never...." The last word was mumbled.

"Never what?" Kate prompted.

"Never had many friends," Rodney said. "I mean, who would want to be my friend? I yell at people, I make them feel stupid, and I make enemies. All the time. I don't even know why Carson hung out with me. Why he even wanted me to go fishing with him." He showed no sign of coming to sit down.

"Well, he must have valued your friendship."

Rodney shook his head slowly. "I guess," he said in little more than a whisper. "But I don't know why."

Kate smiled encouragingly. "Friends make mistakes. And you didn't have a lot of close friends before coming here." "Any" close friends might be more accurate, from what he had told her over the past couple of years, but no need to rub it in. "You're still trying to figure out how to be a friend. That's something a lot of us work on all our lives. And I'm sure Carson made his share of mistakes, but you still stayed his friend. Why?"

"Why?" He looked offended. "Everybody loved Carson! Who wouldn't want to be his friend?"

"You wanted honesty," Kate reminded him.

"Yeah...."

"Everyone acts like Carson Beckett was a saint." Rodney nodded, very slowly, recognizing that she had something up her sleeve but not sure what. "When he was alive, people complained about him all the time! Any number of people didn't want to be his friend!"

"That's because he didn't let anyone interfere with his infirmary," Rodney told her defensively. "And God help you if you interfered with his treatments—even if you were one of his patients."

"He whined. He was afraid of off-world travel, some of his patients drove him nuts; he, in turn, drove them nuts—"

"You can't do this!" Rodney was so aghast he took a few steps towards her and fell back into his chair. "You can't talk about him like this! He was your patient!"

She managed to put a grin on her face, catching Rodney off guard. "Yes, but I didn't just see him as a patient!" Carson came by all the time; in fact, he'd often brought coffee for her. Carson was one of the few to see her as a person, not as the dreaded shrink who was supposedly always looking for reasons to pull people from duty. And he listened to her—not just as a patient, though he sometimes was, and not just professionally. He really listened.

She continued, "None of this is confidential. Doctor Beckett's complaints were legendary—not quite as legendary as yours, of course. But the food was always bad, the tea was never as good as back home, travel was always uncomfortable and usually dangerous."

Rodney's mouth worked, but nothing came out. Now that was a first for Kate Heightmeyer.

"Carson was furious when I misdiagnosed Teyla and then Elizabeth when they were seeing 'ghosts' here. He reamed me. He said I should lose my license. I got angry right back; I yelled at him to stick to his own specialty." The smile left her face. "Of course, he apologized later." She added, "And I miss him like hell." Damn. She meant to keep herself out of this.

"You do?" Rodney thought for a little while. "But why—why tell me this?" he asked.

The clinical persona she had spent years creating had become hard to maintain when she necessarily ate with her patients, exercised with her patients, and sometimes evacuated with her patients. But she needed that persona, even if sometimes she let it slip, because without it, how would she do her job?

So she didn't tell Rodney that she hadn't meant to say it. She said, "Because Carson Beckett wasn't perfect. Because he annoyed the hell out of people, including you, I know. But I asked you why you were friends, and you just told me what anyone could say, not his friends."

Rodney thought this over, but he seemed a little lost. "And your point is?"

"You do know what it means to be a friend. Tell me why you were friends with Carson!"

"Because I liked him! Because he—because he puts up with me, because I could talk to him, because he gets—got—scared when I was scared, because we saw things the same way—except when we didn't, and then we argued, but he never stayed mad, even if I did, for a while—he made it damned hard to stay mad, which could be infuriating in itself—did I mention that he put up with me?"

Torn between an inappropriate giggle and a tear, Kate simply nodded. She'd learned a lot about grief counseling, but nothing had quite prepared her for counseling others when she was grieving the same loss. After a couple of breaths, she asked, "And why do you think he wanted you as a friend?"

"Maybe because...I put up with him?" She smiled encouragingly. "He laughed at my jokes, sometimes, so he must have thought I was funny." Rodney scowled a little. "Of course, he also laughed at me when I wasn't telling jokes." He hesitated, thinking. "And—well, I guess we were a lot alike, though I kidded the hell out of him sometimes. A lot, actually. And I...I liked to be with him. I just...didn't want to go fishing...." Rodney hunched over, staring at the floor again.

"So you do know how to be a friend. In fact, I think you already showed that pretty thoroughly when you thought you were going to die or ascend."

"Well, yeah, when I thought I was gonna die! But...."

"But you're still the same person. You know how to be a friend, but it's not something you focus on all the time. Yes," she forestalled the objection he was about to repeat, "being about to die does focus the mind pretty amazingly."

He nodded a little, and she continued, "Being a friend takes effort, and you're still working on that. But now you've lost a close friend, you haven't finished grieving, and another friend had her mind invaded by a Wraith."

Rodney nodded silently.

Kate took a deep breath—again. "I know you're very results-oriented," she said to Rodney. "So let's talk about what you're going to get out of counseling for now. What results do you want?"

He looked surprised. He shouldn't; she'd taken this approach with him before. "I, uh, I dunno. I guess...I want...I don't know. I thought this was just about—you know, making sure I was good to stay on duty, that sort of thing."

Kate allowed herself to sigh out loud. "I am not here primarily to remove people from duty, regardless of what most of you seem to think." Something else he knew but he seemed to want to hear out loud today.

"Really?" Rodney chuckled. "Yeah, I suppose...."

"Rodney, we're almost out of time," Kate reminded him. "Now I do want you to see me again, not because I'm worried you shouldn't be on active duty, but because I can help you deal with your grief, and maybe even with this...uncertainty about friendships?" She worded that latter part cautiously.

"I think you need to recognize that grief doesn't progress smoothly from one stage to the next. I can give you some reading if it will help," she added.

He shrugged non-commitally.

"Whether you do the reading or not, you need to know—you're still grieving for Carson. You're not over it, and it will sneak up on you. And you're not alone. We all miss him. But—you miss him perhaps more than anyone else. And that's okay. It's okay to mourn him more, and differently.

"And don't be afraid to acknowledge that other people are your friends. You started to call Teyla your friend, but then you stopped and called her your teammate instead."

Rodney's eyes grew bigger. He hadn't realized he'd done that. Kate had to admit that she still felt a little competitive, because she was glad to see his surprise. Treating someone smarter than herself, someone who knew that he was smarter than she was and never hesitated to tell her so, could be difficult. Trying, really. Many psychologists didn't like working with patients they suspected or knew were smarter than they were—or teaching students they knew were smarter, even though had she never flaunted her aptitude like Rodney McKay.

But those psychologists would never know the sense of fulfillment she got from her work with the brilliant people on Atlantis, who needed help just like everyone else but gave back even more than she had imagined when she took this assignment, in ways most of them never knew.

He sat, watching her with attention, clearly waiting for her to say something more. She had said what she needed to say this week, though—and then some.

"Aren't you going to tell me what to do?" he asked after a short silence. "I mean, telling me that it's okay to grieve and it's okay to have friends...." That smug look of his started to creep over his face. "They pay you how much to dispense advice like that?

She managed not to roll her eyes. "I'm not really here to give answers. I'm here to ask questions, so that you can come up with some answers. And, let's face it, Rodney: you won't be satisfied with answers that I give you."

The smug look subsided, and he nodded more seriously. He stood up. She stood as well. She knew better than to expect from Rodney the thanks most patients voiced at the end of a session.

He nodded to her again and began to stand. "Well, I guess...."

"Same time, next week." She went to an old-fashioned appointment book and wrote it down while he watched; she found real, physical writing with a pen had psychological impact. Especially on patients who watched her write it down. They were less likely to miss—and Atlantis had given her experience of an entire new galaxy of excuses for missing appointments.

She looked up at him as she laid her pen down. "Don't worry. I'll e-mail you a reminder." As if Rodney McKay would miss a session unless there really was an emergency—which happened all too often. She had come to enjoy their sessions, the back-and-forth, even his sniping. She couldn't have explained why to anyone.

"Okay. Um—thanks." Well, that was new.

He started to leave but turned around at the door. She was used to this. Most patients seemed to do it. Rodney probably wanted to get in the last word—as usual.

"You miss him too?"

Taken aback, she could only nod at first. When Carson was alive, she had thought of him as a colleague more than a friend; she was still surprised by how much she missed their frequent consultations with each other, Carson dropping by to tell her to keep an eye on someone—and to ask her how she was doing. "Every day."

"Yeah," Rodney replied softly. "Every day." Then he turned and left, leaving the door open behind him.

Kate had ten minutes to pull herself together before her next appointment. She'd have to check to see who it was, because, oddly, she couldn't remember right now. Maybe because no one had brought her any coffee—for almost a month now.

THE END

Thanks to Redbyrd for her comments and encouragement, and to my husband!

I am indebted to Ankhmutes, "Sunday's Child," for the conversation between Rodney and Ronon in which Ronon makes Rodney realize what would have happened if he and Carson had gone fishing that day; you can find her story at Wraithbait.

Please send feedback to: Aelfgyfu (at) gmail (dot) com

The Mead Hall