The set-up for this doesn't really make any sense but I couldn't see anything less getting Rodney to try playing again. It has never made sense to me that McKay would be 'clinical' when he played the piano when he is so utterly passionate about everything else that he does.

SYMPHONY

prologue

It was a little known fact that Dr Rodney McKay loved music. He always had. As a child he had dreamed of being a concert pianist until a teacher who was too blind to see beyond his focus on technical accuracy had shattered that dream. But how could he put the correct feeling into the music if he couldn't be sure of hitting the right keys?

Before that day, he would find solace at the keyboard. When his parents fought, he would retreat and play. Not the works of others that required him to be precise, but what he heard in the world around him. He would play the music he heard in the maths and science that he loved, in the people and things around him and within himself. With no right or wrong notes to worry about, his soul shone through and if his teacher had ever heard him play alone, he would not have accused him of lacking passion. But he never did and the music was silenced with a single cruel comment.

When he was much, much younger, he had tried to explain the music that he heard in scientific concepts and ideas. He quickly learned not to speak of it when his words were dismissed as fanciful or dishonest and he was told that music was 'unscientific'. He still heard it though, and as the years passed, he developed a notation for it that he often used to code his work.

To him, Atlantis and the people in it were like a symphony. Rich and complex with notes that soared and intertwined in a beautiful harmony that no one else knew or heard. The movement of his hands when he got caught up in his work were the only evidence of it's existence. Until the events on P9X-238 forced him to bare his soul and show the world an unimagined side of himself when he released the music from its silent prison.

TBC... please review