Ryan really wasn't kidding about having to buy almost everything when he gets there; when Jake and his mom ("Call me Sherrie," she says, instantly taking a shine to the still-rumpled-from-the-plane Ryan) pick him up from the airport, he has the maximum allowed carry-ons of two bags, one of them a laptop case and the other full of enough clothes for maybe a week. And that's all of the luggage he has for the entire time he'll be here, or at the very least until Thanksgiving or the winter break (but considering he's outright said that all of his other clothes are either uniforms or not allowed by Customs, and a lot of the rest of his stuff wouldn't be allowed by Customs either, it seems unlikely that he'll bring anything back if he goes back for either of those). So they go shopping, because Jake needs to, and Ryan really needs to.
Sometimes Ryan looks like he's perfectly at home in the getting-ready-for-school crowds, but at other times he looks freaked out about them. He explains the dichotomy: "I grew up in the US, so it's not like Wal-Mart or Kohl's or anything is new to me, technically, but I haven't been in that kind of crowds in years. Atlantis is like a really small town, where everybody knows everybody else, so even when there's a crowd this large, which really isn't very often, it isn't strangers in the crowd. And I was in the Marines until we declared independence, so I'm kind of accidentally slipping into subconsciously thinking there's danger." He gives a wry smile. "A lot of Lanteans have issues like that…let's just say I have reasons for being a psychology major."
Ryan seems almost stunned at the menu, even though it's just MacDonald's- "It's been a long time since I actually had a significant choice in food. Normally in Atlantis it's either cafeteria food or a home cooked meal that you don't have options on. And either way, the cooks are kind of…creative, and it isn't always identifiable."
Eventually they finish their shopping, culminating in finding Ryan a car, and move into their dorm room. Ryan gets the bed closest to the window, because he has less stuff (even if he does have many times what he'd started out with) and the other side of the room has shelves and a desk with more drawers. Jake's almost all the way unpacked, but not completely, even if you disregard the box that he's not going to open until he needs something in it, when Ryan finishes unpacking everything of his that Jake had seen and takes out the last item: a mobile of some sort, made of wire and metal and what look like old, broken pieces of computers. And some sort of glass or crystals, all of it blue, some of it with a twinge of cloudy grey and some of it looking like it's been melted or something, with irregular smooth and shiny portions. It looks like nothing so much as scrap attached at random, but when Ryan hangs it in the window it floods the room with light that's sometimes blue and sometimes teal.
"That's beautiful," Sherrie says. "Where'd you get it from?"
"Beautiful and useless," Ryan says, an unreadable expression on his face as he touches a couple of the pieces. "It was a gift." And that's all he'll ever say about it.
