Guess What by Sealie (SGA_flashfic Personal Item Challenge)

Type: Genfic
Spoilers: none

Beta: LKY

Contact: sealie@trickster.org or sealie1@hotmail.com

“Come on. Come on. What’s your personal item?” Rodney persisted as he slammed down his lunch tray on their shared table. “I bet it’s whisky.”

“Please.” Carson rolled his eyes heavenward. “What a cliché. I thought that you had more imagination.”

“Okay, sporran.”

“Please,” Carson repeated and then ferried a piece of mystery meat from his plate to his mouth, grimacing all the way.

“That knife thing that you Scots put in your sock.”

Carson winced. “Sgian dhu.”

“Bless you.” Rodney chortled at his own humour. “I guessed right, didn’t I?”

“No.” Carson poked his stew a little bit more. He wasn’t that hungry. “I realise that this is the latest craze: guess the personal item. How many points do you score if you’re the first person to find out what I brought?”

“Hundred points if it’s ‘culturally relevant’.” Rodney mimed the quotation marks. “Twenty if it’s not.”

“Don’t you have enough to do without playing daft games?”

“Kavanagh’s winning,” Rodney said darkly.

“Ah.”

“What I don’t understand is how he’s winning. He’s a moron,” Rodney grumped. “And Sheppard’s second.”

“And you can’t stand not being King of the Castle,” Carson observed. “They’re people’s personal items. Personal as in private. It’s not a game.”

Rodney shrugged, caught up in the competition. “Do you really want Kavanagh to win?”

“So how many points do I get for knowing that the Ph.D. certificates on your wall are your personal item?”

“How did you know that!” Rodney demanded, aggrieved.

“That time that you had the ‘flu and insisted that I come to your death bed,” Carson said. “So if that’s not culturally sensitive how many points do I get?”

“Twenty,” Rodney said sullenly and then brightened. “It’s a kilt isn’t it?”

“Does Sheppard’s football video collection count as a hundred or twenty points?” Carson shook his head. “Nah, a hundred; football’s cultural.”

Rodney waved his hand casually. “Oh, that’s common knowledge. Doesn’t count. It’s about getting secretive, private people’s stuff.”

“Rodney, you’re unbelievable. It’s an invasion of--”

“Come on. Come on,” McKay cajoled ignoring him. “You’re my friend. You’re my best friend. Let me have my points.”

“It’s nothing to get excited about.” Carson slowly dipped his spoon in the stew.

Rodney leaned forward furtively, and said lowly, “You have to tell someone. Let me have the points, then you’ll be left alone.”

There was something in that. Carson decided to put them both out of their misery. “It’s a picture.”

“A picture.”

“Yes, a picture. A picture of my mam.”

“Your mom. Okay.” Rodney slumped back in his chair. “Twenty points to me then.”

“Twenty points,” Carson confirmed.

Rodney rolled his head back and contemplated the ceiling. “Okay, I’ve got a hundred and eighty points. I’ve got to get Elizabeth’s. It better be cultural.”

Food abandoned – a heartbeat later he was out the door. Carson shook his head. The man had the manners of a pregnant boar with a toothache. But he had left his dessert of chocolate mousse with tinned pears.

“Hundred and eighty?” Beckett mentally tallied his own score. McKay wasn’t even close. Although he wasn’t going to play since it would be a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality

Rodney dogged Elizabeth’s heels back into the dining room and persisted as she shuffled along the bank of heated catering trays trying to decide what was worth eating.

The man was so competitive, Carson thought, it was quite pathological.

Leastwise he could tell the next person that asked that Rodney had his points.

A hundred points for a culturally relevant personal item, he contemplated.

There was that case of Scottish Speyside single malts that he had secreted in the back of the BODC O2 cabinet in his research laboratory.

Nah. They weren’t personal items.

They were, of course, purely for medicinal purposes.

fin