We Invented the Remix...Redux V

Title: Home [The Felis Catus Extended Mix]
Author: gblvr
Summary: For Rodney, cats are home.
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Pairing: John/Rodney
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: None of what you might recognize in this story is owned by me: the characters and most of the settings are owned by the suits, and the original story is owned by wickedwords. All I claim is the new order of the words....
Original story: Domestic Shorthair by wickedwords
Notes: Time! Need more time! Having said that -- this was a heck of a lot of fun! Thanks for letting me play in your sandbox! A HUGE thank you to my last minute (but still very awesome) betas, merryish and twistedchick; any remaining errors are mine and mine alone, as I ripped the story apart and re-did it at the last minute....


As far back as he could remember Rodney had loved cats. Well, there had been the one dog, but he ran away after only three days, so really, he didn't count.

To Rodney, a cat was home. Cats didn't judge people and find them lacking. Cats didn't tell you one thing when they meant another, and they certainly didn't dump you and steal all your DVDs when they moved out. All they needed was some food, a bit of catnip and a warm place to sleep, and in return they gave you their love.

His mother's pair of Egyptian Maus had adopted him as a child, watching over him as a baby, following him as he toddled through the house. They'd started to sleep one on either side of him as soon as he'd been taken from the crib, and even when his mother had closed the door against them, they'd figured out it didn't latch tightly, and pushed until it popped open, and then crept in to bracket him under the blankets.

Their defection had infuriated his mother, had given her one more reason to resent him, as if the very fact of being born at the wrong time in her life wasn't enough. When he left for college, Jeanne said the cats had wandered through the house, looking for him and crying. When they died later in the year, no one thought to tell him.

He didn't go home after that until his father died. By then Jeanne had gone away to school, and his mother had acquired another pair of cats, Siamese this time, who had loved Rodney on sight.

*

He wasn't allowed to have pets in the dorms at any of the universities he attended. Instead, he fed the strays that lived in the field behind the physics building at Northwestern until one of them turned up dead. He suspected one of the janitorial staff had sprinkled rat poison into the battered metal bucket of dry food he put out each morning. He didn't feed any strays after that, not until he had his own place.

*

In Nevada, before he even bought any furniture, he went to the local pound, and adopted a fat, sassy cat. He worked long, sometimes monotonous hours, and he was usually glad to leave the lab to go home and feed her. If he was late, she'd twine around his legs, meowing her displeasure. When she was especially hungry, she'd nip at his ankles while he filled her dishes. He'd sit at the table, skritching her ears as she ate, ignoring the dust and piles of unopened mail in favor of the soft fuzz beneath his fingers.

*

When he was sent to Russia, he left her with his assistant -- there was no point in taking her all that way for what was surely a temporary stay. When he slept, sometimes it was in the square drab room he'd been assigned, but more often it was in the lab, on a rickety cot that he'd found in the back of the storage closet. His temporary stay lasted twelve months; at the end he moved into the first apartment he looked at, drove to Nevada for his cat, and swore to himself he'd never piss off Samantha Carter ever again.

His fat and sassy kitty had grown thin, and the sharpness of Colorado's cold disagreed with her. Whenever she had the chance, she'd sleep on top of Rodney's laptop. After replacing the fan in his PowerBook a second time, he learned to leave the shades up in the living room, on the side of the room that was brightest, so she could sleep in the sun. She looked happy like that, curled in on herself in the patch of multicolored light, and the only thing that stopped Rodney from joining her was worry about what the hard floor would do to his back.

The day he was reassigned to Antarctica, he came home early and curled up behind her; the sun was warm on his skin, and he drifted off stroking the soft fur on her tummy. When he woke up, it was chilly, and his back was aching just like he'd thought it would, and he was covered in cat hair and he'd probably caught pneumonia from the cold air, but surprisingly, he was at peace, happy. When he left her with his neighbor the next morning before catching his flight, he was still smiling.

*

Stepping through the Stargate to Atlantis was the bravest thing Rodney ever did. He took a deep breath, looked around the gate room one last time, and walked away from everything he'd ever known, towards everything he'd ever wanted to know.

In Atlantis, his room was what could kindly be termed controlled chaos, but it was clean, and sadly, there wasn't a cat hair in sight. Because he had no reason to leave the lab most nights, he worked until he was tired, and sometimes that meant he didn't sleep at all.

At first he missed his cat. He missed feeding her in the middle of the night. He missed the sharp nips to the ankle when he lost track of time and didn't come home until the morning. He missed the rusty sound of her purr and the soft fur behind her ears. But between supervising the morons in the lab, not getting killed on missions, and, oh yes, saving their asses more times than he could count, he was too busy to dwell on it much.

After a year of near misses and more than a few hits, Rodney was surprised to find that when he thought of home, he didn't think of a messy house and a fat cat. Without him realizing, home had become a cluttered room in a city that lit up when he asked it to. Home was the Pegasus galaxy, with its scientific puzzles and strange fruit and familiar aliens. Home was every piece of Ancient tech he made work, from the puddle jumpers to the personal shields to the handheld scanners; the space vampires were a small price to pay for the joy of exploring the spires and halls of Atlantis and finding more toys to take back to the lab. Home was MREs and rationed coffee and the never-ending search for ZedPMs and cool blue light rippling through the Stargate.

But even more than that, home was sharp hazel eyes and a lazy drawl and soft touches in the dark. Home was a face full of black hair and long lean limbs sprawled on top of him and a sun-warmed bed to sleep in. Home was the sharp ache of desire and the sweet spreading pleasure of being fucked and the slow release of tension in another's arms.

In Atlantis, home was John.