Current mood:	accomplished
Current music:	General Hospital
Entry tags:	challenge, fic, numb3rs, sga, sn, sports night

Fic: The Sound of One Hand Clapping(SGA/SN/Numb3rs) PG13
Title: The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Author: HYPERFocused
Fandoms: Stargate Atlantis/ Sports Night/ Numb3rs
Rating: PG13
Pairing: Sam Rydell/ Charlie Eppes. Dan Rydell/Casey McCall
A/N: An AU for pretty much all of the shows mentioned above, but especially for SGA’s “Letters from Pegasus” and Sports Night. (“The Apology” episode in particular) Written for slodwick’s Worst Case Scenario Challenge, using the prompt “What to do for a severed limb”. It all started with a comment conversation in celli’s LJ. Blame her and out_there for encouraging me, and me for the execution.





Sam Rydell is sick and tired of it all. The pity, the concern, whispers behind his back. It’s always the same. Everyone wants to know what happened to him – Sam can see it in the way they don’t quite look at him -- but only Rodney, who has no inner censor, asks outright, responding with an “Oh, that’s just gross” when Sam tells him in too much detail. Sam likes him, he’s been the wunderkind ahead of Sam for years now but he can be such a pain in the ass, that it’s almost fun to disturb him this way.

The rest of them tell him how brave he must have been to overcome such tragedy at such a young age and how well he’s adapted. He didn’t much like that at sixteen, and he certainly doesn’t need those kinds of empty accolades now.

Charlie is different, right from the beginning. When he listens to Sam’s explanation, he doesn’t spout the usual platitudes, but his big cartoon eyes are sympathetic. When Sam goes back to his room that evening, there’s a diagram taped to his door: the bank, the car, the trajectory of the bricks as they fell. “Just one change,” the note scrawled at the bottom says. Sam doesn’t know if he means just one change and Sam would be dead, or just one change and he would be whole. When it comes right down to it, he was kind of dead when he was whole.

There isn’t much bigger change to be made, Sam thinks, than starting a new life in an entirely different galaxy. God knows he needs the break. No place on Earth is far enough away to escape his family’s well meaning. His father’s secret shame in losing his perfect son, his mother’s protective streak that kept him from really living, and most of all, Dan’s guilt. It was Sam’s own stupidity that caused him to get wasted, and then get in that car. Dan had nothing to do with it.

He wishes he could tell Dan how happy he is now. How he’s where he belongs, even if he does miss his big brother like crazy. “I’d give my right arm to go up in Space,” he’d said on more than one occasion as a kid, and he’d probably almost meant it.

“Then it’s a good thing you’re left-handed,” had been Dan’s stock answer. He guessed it was, but he would have made it work either way. Sam was nothing if not adaptable. That was why he’d been approached by the SGC.

“Not just for your intellect, son,” General Hammond had told him when he was first recruited. “We could have asked any number of scientific geniuses. It’s your resiliency we wanted. We know you’ll make a good fit with us.”

---

He’s been on Atlantis for almost a year now, but sometimes Sam still doesn’t know what to make of the Ancients. He wonders if they felt the wrenching of spirit from flesh, the way he felt it when they tore him away from the car, and left his arm behind. Did they sense a phantom body, the way he still flexes his elbow, and feels himself typing with both hands, though it’s been over a decade since he’s been able to do so for real.

They’d found the device a few weeks into the trip, Major Sheppard dragging him almost gleefully into Dr Beckett’s office to try it out. “Now think about your missing arm” the doctor had told him. He’d attached the clearly advanced device to Sam’s shoulder, where it had changed, almost, but not quite, looking and feeling real.

It still isn’t comfortable, the prosthetic, even if he does have the gene, and can make it work better than he’d been able to do with the ones he’d tried on Earth. But the way it interfaces with his brain just takes something out of him.

But he wore it all the time when he wasn’t alone; not wanting to seem ungrateful for the supposed gift the Ancients had left behind for him. He could live with the discomfort. He was lucky to have the option.

Charlie doesn’t care about how he looks, how he’s supposed to look. “You don’t need this now. Let it go.” he tells Sam, stroking the metal strands that attach the arm to Sam’s shoulder. He doesn’t just mean the prosthetic. It opens, slipping off onto the bed where Sam places it on the dresser, already feeling relieved.

Clarlie climbs into the bed behind him, legs tucked against the back of Sam’s knees, left arm wrapped around his chest, and the place where Sam’s arm used to be. It’s a close fit, Charlie’s limbs are lean and lithe. The pair of them fit together like puzzle pieces, and Sam doesn’t want to be separated.

Charlie touches Sam’s scars just like he touches the rest of Sam, with serious intent. There’s never any hesitation, no sense that he’s either too fragile, or too grotesque for Charlie to want. “Three is a perfect number,” he tells Sam, warm hands smoothing down his one arm, and his legs, in turn. Sam grows hard and comfortable all at once, the best feeling, except for when Charlie’s long, strong fingers make him feel even better.

Before Atlantis, before Charlie, Sam didn’t know he wanted this. He’d been as slow on the uptake as Danny had been with his best friend Casey. He wondered if took traveling to another galaxy to shake his world up enough for him to take this journey.

But he had a connection with Charlie, a bond that went beyond their similarity of upbringing: Smart, Jewish, with older brothers they’d have done anything to please. Judging from the way Charlie sometimes yelled out “Don” in his sleep -- a sound Sam had gotten used to when he heard the same tone in their own intimate moments – Sam was pretty sure Charlie had been a lot closer to his brother than Sam had been to Dan,. That seemed pretty damn weird, but who was he to say anything? Being on a different planet, threatened by life sucking vampire type aliens really put things into perspective.

Sam had had his share of girlfriends, fewer after the accident, it’s true, but still, he’d never lacked for companionship. Or rather, he’d never lacked for sex. There had been plenty of girls who’d felt sorry for him, or seen him as some sort of mascot. Poor little tortured genius. True companionship came with more difficulty.

Now that he’s with Charlie, Sam realizes it always had. His friendships had been superficial, all of his real self going into research and competition. He’d been driven to accomplishment, both by his own intellect and by the expectations of his family – his father especially – saying he was their genius, and they knew he could do anything. It was a hell of a lot to live up to, and he almost envied Dan for not playing the game.

Sometimes, he’d wanted to do nothing, a trick Dan seemed to have mastered at an early age. Not an absolute ‘nothing’, Dan had brought home grades that were just good enough to get their parents off his case (and get him into a good school.)

They’d never expected that much more from him. He had hidden his intelligence in a cloak of normalcy that only wore off after Sam’s accident. His affability was a disguise he rarely removed. It was only the few people who really got to know him that saw the troubled, hurting man underneath.

Sam wished he’d been allowed to be one of them, but his glimpses had been a tape of Dan and Casey’s show, where Dan had apologized, (needlessly, Sam thought) blaming himself for Sam’s accident, and a letter from Casey accompanying it. Like most mail, it had taken months to get to him in Antarctica.

When he first joined the Stargate Program, or “did research in Deep Space Telemetry” as he was taught to tell everyone not connected, people thought he’d be a liability. It was why he’d never been allowed to go off-world from the SGC. He was just a bright cog in the wheel, without the chance to prove he was more than a brain. That changed when it turned out just how special his brain really was. It could turn on alien technology. Not as well as Major Sheppard, but enough to make up for the weakness they thought his missing arm gave him. He was signed onto the Atlantis project forthwith.

If staying in touch from the Ancient base on Earth had been difficult, correspondence to and from Atlantis was next to impossible. They’d managed a single mass communication when it came down to life or death. Everyone had been able to record a final message, though nobody wanted to think of it that way. He’d thought long and hard about what he needed to say, and to whom. It was overwhelming. Finally he just pretended he was talking to Danny, in the room they’d shared as kids.

“I know you aren’t going to believe this, Danny, and it sucks that I can’t tell you in person. It sucks even more that I can’t tell you why.

“But what I want you to know is, the accident was the best thing that ever could have happened to me. If I still had my arm, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have seen the amazing things I have. God, Dan, this place makes the ‘shot heard round the world’ look like a Little League game. I wish I could tell you about it. I wish you could see it.”

He paused a minute, stopping the recording. “Actually, no, I don’t. Because you’re safe and happy now where you are. I can see that on the tapes. Did you know several people brought Sports Night as part of their personal items? You and Casey, and the best and brightest moments from Earth.” He knew that wouldn’t make it past the censors, so he backed up. “From home.

“You never owed me an apology, Dan. Not ever. But now I think maybe I owe you one. We all do, for what’s going to happen if we can’t fix this…

“I wish I could tell you what ‘this’ is, but I can’t. Just know that I’m doing the most important work I could ever hope to do, and that I’m just exactly where I belong. I’ve got friends here, and everything. Good ones.” Sam smiled as Charlie came into view, head bent over the tablet in his hand. “Say hi to my brother, Charlie,” Sam commanded. Charlie looked up at him, his serious expression washed away for a moment by a look that made Sam want to shut the recorder off and kiss him. He did just that, switching it back on after a few minutes. There’d be tme for more later, he hoped.

“It sounds like you’re just exactly where you belong, too.” Sam continued. “Say hi to Casey for me, and tell Charlie – Casey’s Charlie – to stay out of trouble.”

“Tell Mom and Dad and everyone back home I love them, too, and not to worry about me. Oh, and to cut you some damn slack.

“Love you, Dan.” He signed off.

He thought about his brother, and how he wished he could tell Dan everything. Dan’s compassionate heart would be such a boon on Atlantis, and in the Pegasus galaxy at large, and Casey made it whole.

At the same time, he was glad Dan was home and safe. Maybe, someday, Dan could help them by doing what he did best.

Sam turned the recording device back on again, starting out this way: “I’m Sam Rydell, speaking from the Pegasus Galaxy. This is a message for my brother, Dan Rydell, and his partner Casey McCall. The true story of where I’ve been, and why. It’s to be given to them upon declassification, in whole or in part -- a bigger scoop than any story written so far. Nobody could tell it better.”