glassesg33k | Oil - Chapter I

Chapter Summary: How Rodney's life began and general grypings.
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Posted: Monday March 24th 2014 Author: GlassesG33k
Chapter Rating: PG
Word Count: 1,883
Cross-posted: http://glassesg33k.livejournal.com/ http://archiveofourown.org/users/GlassesG33k/works
Special Thanks: To the best BETA in the world, Tactless Truth! *fanfare* :-D BIG thanks to her for BETA'ing this while ill, love you lots Tactless. :-)She's going through some really tough times right now and it was because of her struggles that I came up with this story. I hope this helps and is my little gift to you Tactless :-) And if anyone is so inclined she could really use some prayer right now, thanks. :-)

Additional A/N: Since Tactless is very ill right now it looks like she will be unable to BETA the rest of this for me I'm open to anyone willing to BETA the rest of this for me, otherwise you'll have to put up with my editing of it past oh, say chapter 4.
P.S.: I just want to address any concerns, despite the Terminal Category that this is listed under there shall be no death here! says me ;-D, so don't worry no one dies.
Just read and you'll discover WHY. :-)

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Chapter I

ONE

To say Rodney McKay's life had not gone the way he had hoped it would would be an understatement.

Before the age of one he found that everyone and thing around him was rather dull, by three he had been taught that if you're smart that just means you're blamed for whatever goes wrong, and there's no way to argue yourself out of it.

By five he learned that if you're poor then you don't get a good education and are forced to sit in class with your brain rotting away no matter how much you insist you already know everything.

By six Rodney's family had moved down into the lower Southern U.S. where he quickly learned what “Corporal Punishment” was and that it was enforced in school. That year Rodney learned that he was a “damned yank” and that since he was a “damned yank” it was his fault for every little thing, even concocted items or problems that had no basis in reality. Later on he'd realize that it was prejudice he was being beaten with verbally, socially and otherwise plain and simple; no matter how much everyone around him denied it and instead pointed to all of his “flaws” and all the ways he was “evil” such as being born in Canada, being a “Democrat” though that was never true, and being, “for the damn niggers”. Since everyone around him wanted him to “go home! Just GO HOME!” (which never made sense) and he couldn't they were going to eliminate him as quickly as possible in whatever way possible. This meant that before he was say six months into his school year he was spanked, extremely hard with a compressed baseball bat the school called a “paddle” by his teachers first then the principle and then yelled at hard by his parents at home for “acting out in class”. Thankfully his parents had the wherewithal to get the heck out of the U.S. and went back home to Canada.

The next year he figured out that even though it was shit Canada was better then America when it came to … well, everything.

Life continued on after that, in one miserable way or another.

His parents fighting over him and his sister until his Mom died the very next year, at the age of eight. … and then his Dad remarried.

This time though he got the joy of far to many half sisters (three in all) in name only as far as he was concerned. As time went on and his damned parents kept on it like rabbits he got way to many more siblings, till there were at least seven of them.

To many for Rodney to keep track of as far as he was concerned. The only one he ever really cared about was his whole sister or “real” sister as far as he was concerned. Somewhere along the way though she grew up, decided he sucked, and turned her back on him like all the rest.

…

It didn't matter anyway.

What did matter though was math and being able to apply it and through this medium prove that he was right and had been right since the beginning. Because of this Rodney pursued Mathematics and applied physics getting a double degree. Once he was finally out of school he had been expected to be the first to get a Nobel prize an he'd sworn to work towards this goal. He had many theories and through the pure perfect logic of mathematics he was able to finally start piecing together the origins of the universe and the meaning of life itself, as far as he saw it. Heck if he worked hard enough he'd be able to get a Nobel Peace Prize within a decade. Upon his graduation Rodney was sure of all this.

There was just one monumental flaw in it all though, money.

After his degree Rodney had no idea that he wouldn't be able to get a job, or at least one that paid well enough to keep his head above water. So in the end he spent his next remaining years which ended up amounting to the whole of his adult working life breaking his back to keep his many and various jobs, most of which didn't pay him enough to make ends meet and ended before he could even collect say a fourth paycheck. No one understood him and tolerance for his type of caustic and point blank truthful personality was rare to say the least.

He'd had goals and dreams when he had gone into this field and he quickly found that unless you had money coming out your ass then you were screwed from the get go. No matter who you knew or how many connections you made you were not going to be able to peruse your goals mush less have your dreams become reality.

Though after receiving his Ph.D. he was finally able to snag a job that paid him better then the others.

Unfortunately the big bucks and fame didn't come with it, instead of say even eighty-thousand American Dollars a year in salary he was forced to accept a position where he was virtually working three jobs in three different departments at once and making a mere fifty-thousand a year, at best; most years he only cleared forty-five thousand. And that was before taxes and other personal and academic expenses. The school had never told him he was going to have to spend his own paycheck to merely buy supplies for the various departments and students. Or say pay to have something fixed even though it was the fault of the school for not replacing something when it was too old to be used without breaking. So in the end he was lucky to walk away with say twenty-thousand in his pocket which barely covered rent and toiletries. Rodney just wished that the school would at least do him the courtesy of providing food; another “luxury” that had to come out of his pocket.

It wasn't long, maybe five years into his new “career” that he finally had to stop and face it all, coming to terms with the truth. He wasn't going to get his dreams much less be able to reach his goal of a Nobel Prize.

At all ever.

This caused him to review his life and try to figure out what was the good in sticking around if he wasn't going to be able to get his Nobel's, or even answer his many questions about the universe.

His mind went blank as if going dead already from the mere suggestion.

...

He shook his head, if he was this bad off then how much worse off were people working in say the retail industry, or even his own students. … Maybe that was why most of them smelled and looked like they were living in their cars, it was because they were. And here the sciences, back when he was young, had been a sure bet to being able to provide for yourself at least, family too if you were so inclined and lucky.

Rodney sat back and thought about that wishing he'd been able to be accepted, that people and therefore society were different.

That there had been a chance for him from the get go.

But friendship and more so romance was something for the rich and he wasn't one of them, it was clear now he'd never be that lucky. Heck he never had and never would have the time to pick up a phone and call his sister to see how she was doing, and no one wanted him around anyway that was blatantly clear. … Being a thorn in everyone's side was; well it made life downright impossible to live especially when everyone kept insisting that they were right and he was wrong, Wrong, WRONG. It didn't seem to matter how many times he pointed out the facts and the blatantly obvious everything was run according to some skewed social code and hierarchy that he still hadn't been able to crack.

Rodney deflated and looked at the many and various student papers tossed on the table before himself. No he'd never be able to get what he wanted and life was truly about making it to the end, which meant the ripe old age of say eighty and then die alone, for everyone died alone anyway didn't they.

Rodney rubbed his brow and looked away from the mess before himself, so the real question in the end was why keep going.

…

It took the better part of a week but he finally realized that the only thing keeping him around was having enough money to support himself and not being homeless (though it was a close thing most of the time) like his own students were.

Having enough money to get him by and be even slightly better off then someone else, such as the people who served him at the many and various drive-throughs and take out restaurants he frequented was about the only reward he'd be getting in this life time. From the looks of others around him some days it seemed to be a pretty big reward, at least he wasn't living out of a car with three kids, totally alone and trying to get a degree while working three jobs. Most importantly though, knowing far more then anyone else around him was what got him to stick around, for the time being at least, or that's what he told himself. Really though it was not being homeless and being too busy and worn out at the end of each day to do anything else but sleep, in his office as per usual, that stopped him from finally say, taking a long walk off a short pier.

Time slipped by Rodney doing his damnedest to ignore it and speed it up as mush as he could. Then after he hit his late twenties something curious happened, time started to speed up. At first he actually calculated whether or not it had sped up since it clearly had in some odd way, he even blamed it on technology thinking clocks were timing things faster, giving less split seconds in every minute since business was wanting more work done faster. It made sense especially since everything ran on digital now instead of old fashioned mechanics, something that was harder or more obvious if you tried to tamper with it.

Then his thirties hit and time suddenly started disappearing with out his knowledge of it. Before he knew it it was New Years, and then New years again, and it left him wondering when he'd missed his birthday and what year-or how old he was now.

He'd never known the world or life to go so fast and in the far back of his mind he started to believe that it was truly some kind of wormhole, time dilation field or some other sci. fi. oddity. He soon began calculating wormhole physics in scribbles on scraps of paper in his free time.

Despite all of this what came next he just wasn't ready for and it turned his world on it's head.