Randominity

At least I did something else on my four-day weekend.



"Hey, I got some big news for you, Rodney," Linda had said, joining him in the cafeteria with a bag of shredded lettuce she was carefully applying to a sesame seed bun. "Looks like the Powers That Be are transferring you. New opportunities, I think you'll love it." There was the slightest trace of satisfaction in her too-loud voice, a smirk on her smug, pinched face.

Rodney narrowed his eyes, gaze skittering down to the access badge Linda had clipped to her breast pocket. As Middle Management, Linda had Ways of accessing things, like secret Area 51 compounds, that had stymied Rodney the entire time he'd been working there. Yet as far as he knew, she didn't have a job of her own to speak of. "What do you mean, transferring me?" he demanded, pulling his styrofoam cup of coffee closer to him like a buffer.

Linda licked her fingers and set about opening another Ziplock bag. "They're sending you to Siberia, I heard," she said, not even sparing him a glance.

Oh, that was just. "You did this, didn't you," Rodney pointed at her. "What, they don't have enough Reapers in Siberia? Is there some," he waved his fingers, "freak increase in Siberian death rates going on that merits the transfer of non-natives all of a sudden? Non-natives who don't speak Russian? Did I mention I don't speak Russian?"

"Hey," Linda shrugged, and laid two slices of tomato neatly over the lettuce. "I'm just the messenger. Don't look at me." The intensely disliked messenger, Rodney thought, but it wasn't as though the feeling weren't mutual. "So, tell your people you have to take a leave of absence," Linda went on, "or you have to visit some family or something. I don't give a shit. Just get ready to leave."

"Yes, because it's just that easy," he said. "Listen, I can't just-- I have files, I'm doing very important research-- hey, where are you going?"

Linda tossed him a Post-It note as she rose from the table, freshly-assembled sandwich in hand. "I gotta go," she said vaguely. "I gotta do a thing. Take care of that, will you?" She gestured to the Post-It. "You're cutting it kind of close on time already. Oh," she said over her shoulder as she turned to go. "Enjoy your last reap in the U S of A." She saluted with two fingers and was gone.

--

In the end, Rodney's reap (one Teal C., Estimated Time of Death 1:24pm) was a bust. Rodney spent the day butting heads with everyone at the SGC in an attempt to pop the poor sap's soul before he was regurgitated into a soup of malformed DNA. It turned out everyone really, really loved the guy, even the hot blonde military scientist who seemed to think that somehow, if she just wished hard enough and made up some physics on the spot, she could cheat death. She was still one of the most brilliant women Rodney had ever wanted to sleep with.

It also turned out that the Powers That Be had their own methods of making things happen; the reap's appointment was canceled before Rodney even got there, and the SGC paid for Rodney's transfer themselves, with a less-than-shining performance review. So if everyone thought Rodney was a dick just for trying to do his job, well, then all the better for Linda and her half-assed scheme to get him shipped off to Siberia.

He really had to learn to avoid getting involved with the living.