Becoming
by lamardeuse
Overall series rating: NC-17
Set before and during SGA 2x07, "Instinct".
About three weeks after he blew up five sixths of a solar system and John’s faith in him, he ran into Cadman in the hall outside the infirmary. She had an idiotic grin plastered to her face and then she saw him and her eyes lit up and goddammit, he just knew she was going to tell him all about it.
Privately, though, he had to admit that he’d brought this one on himself. He’d had the opportunity to put an end to this strange camaraderie last month when she’d plunked down across from him in the mess hall and proceeded to tell him all of the sordid details of her first date with Carson. He could’ve told her right then and there that inhabiting the same body for a few days had not turned them into secret-sharing girlfriends, and that he was perfectly happy going through life never having to think about Beckett having sex with anybody. Ever.
He’d been about to tell her exactly this when he’d looked into her wide, smiling eyes and something had held him back, something that he supposed must have been conscience or fondness or a mixture of both, not that he was familiar enough with either to recognize them without difficulty. And so instead of cutting her off with his typical double-edged wit, he’d sighed and shoved mashed potatoes into his face and listened to how oh my God sexy Carson’s accent was when his mouth was trailing over her skin and oh my God he wanted to vomit.
He remembered being annoyed by Sheppard’s accent at first, that lackadaisical Western drawl he associated with John Wayne and other arrogant symbols of American manhood. Of course, this was back when he was 99.5% certain the good Major was straight—the hair accounting for the margin of error. He was irritated by the way he said Rawwwd-nee like he was a misbehaving six-year-old and not the most brilliant mind of his generation; he was irritated by the grin that conveyed the unshakable belief that you too would fall victim to his boundless charm; and most of all he was irritated by Sheppard’s gene, that of all people fate had chosen a dumb jock flyboy who had no way to appreciate the incredible gift that was his by accident.
And then a few days after Atlantis had surfaced, Rodney had been walking around the upper tower and found Sheppard sitting cross-legged on the highest observation deck, staring out at the setting sun as it sank into the endless ocean.
“Looking to burn your retinas, Major?” he’d said tartly, only to have Sheppard turn and grace him with the most open, guileless grin Rodney had ever seen in his life. And in that moment, Rodney knew exactly what Sheppard was thinking, because now that the terror of nearly drowning had worn off, he’d been thinking the same thing pretty much constantly.
They were in another galaxy, on an alien planet, in a floating city, and it was so incredibly cool.
As he felt a matching grin spread across his own features, he realized there was more to Major Sheppard than artful hair and a nasal twang.
“So how’s your love life, McKay?” Cadman was asking him, her smug grin not nearly so winning as others he could name.
Without thinking, he muttered, “It’s at an all-time low, actually, but thank you for asking.” When his own words belatedly made it to his brain, he looked up and saw Cadman staring at him, her expression soft and—God—sympathetic.
“Oh, Rodney,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “I’m so sorry. Things didn’t work out, huh?”
This startled him so much that it was his turn to stare at her. “Um,” he said intelligently as his thoughts careened around the inside of his skull. She hadn’t been able to read his mind any more than he’d been able to read hers, and he was damned sure he’d never said anything about John to her, so where could she possibly be getting her information?
“You know,” Cadman continued, “I’m sure it wasn’t anyone’s fault. Maybe you just weren’t compatible. I hate to say this, but it struck me that you two didn’t have a lot in common.”
Rodney’s stomach flipped. Although she seemed perfectly blasé about her superior officer’s homosexual leanings, Rodney knew that if word of those leanings made it to the wrong people, John’s military career would be over as of yesterday. He worked through about six solutions (including bribery and murder) before discarding them all.
“Well,” he managed weakly. “I suppose that—that might have been an issue.”
“That’s right,” Cadman said with a final squeeze of his arm. “Just remember, Katie Brown isn’t the only fish in the sea.”
Rodney blinked. You unmitigated moron, he chastised himself silently. “Right. True. Very, very true. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”
“Sure,” Cadman said easily. “Nice seeing you again.” Her lip twitched. “With my own eyes, of course.”
“Of course,” Rodney said with a grimace, turning to go.
“And Rodney?” He spun around, eyebrows raised. “You could double-date with us sometime. For moral support, you know?” Her expression grew mischievous. “And maybe a few…tips.”
Rodney raised a finger. “I think I’d rather be in Hell with my back broken. But if those ever become my only two choices, I promise I’ll give it some more consideration.”
His last image of her was of her tongue sticking out of her pretty face. “I can see why Carson finds you irresistible,” he called out, watching her stomp away with no feeling of satisfaction at all.
He did his best to resist Major Sheppard’s charms for as long as he could, but it wasn’t easy when circumstances threw them together so often. Rodney was now part of a team, which wasn’t a situation he was used to—certainly, he’d worked with other scientists before, but it wasn’t as though any of them had ever approached his level. With Sheppard and Teyla and Ford, he was a piece of a puzzle rather than the apex of a pyramid. Each one of them had their own function, their own portion of sky or land to describe; he could do their jobs no more easily than they could do his.
And so gradually he found himself starting to actually enjoy the feeling of walking through a field on an alien planet with Sheppard loping along beside him, relishing the unfamiliar security of belonging to a small, contained tribe. It wasn’t a feeling he’d sought out, but now that it had been dropped into his lap, he found it was addictive.
Addiction was the only explanation for the fact that he’d gone toe-to-toe with a Wraith armed with only a handgun and two lousy clips of ammunition. It also explained why he’d find himself down in the mess hall for movie night watching some ridiculous schlock (Back to the Future, for heaven’s sake) while Sheppard goofily chuckled beside him in the darkness. And it provided a neat rationale for his behavior toward Sheppard, which even he recognized was flirtatious at best and obsessive at worst.
The night they returned from their second encounter with Kolya, frustration and fury had driven him into the shower, where he’d taken ahold of himself with ruthless determination and come an astonishingly short time later with the image of Major Sheppard in his head. The truly sick thing was that he hadn’t pictured Sheppard naked and gasping against the tile, but sitting at a too-small desk in the middle of a crowded auditorium, diligently solving differential equations on an undergraduate calculus exam.
Definitely obsessive, he’d concluded as he toweled off and tumbled into bed.
It was like a bad joke in a bad movie. There were three rooms left in the inn; obviously, Teyla got one of her own, but that left two of them paired up.
All of the rooms were equipped with large beds, at least queen size. Rodney’s mouth was actually watering at the luxury until he heard Ronon offer to share with him.
Rodney jerked his head up. “Oh, great. You’ll roll over in the middle of the night and squash me like a bug.”
Ronon bared his teeth; Rodney was proud of himself for not taking a step back. “I’ll sleep on the floor,” Ronon informed him. “I’ve been sleeping on worse for seven years.”
“You’ll get your own bed,” John said firmly. Rodney looked up and saw that he was addressing Ronon. An unpleasant rolling sensation bloomed in his gut.
Ronon shook his head. “You’re the commander. You should get your own quarters.”
John snorted. “I’d rather have you following my orders than worrying about my privileges, but I guess it’s a start,” he murmured. Switching gears abruptly, he clapped Ronon on the arm and said, “Look, you’re a big boy, you deserve a big bed all to yourself. Sack out and we’ll see you in the morning.”
Ronon’s heavy-lidded gaze flicked to Rodney in a look that might have been speculative, and then he nodded sharply and stalked off to the other room.
Unperturbed, John made a sweeping motion with his arm toward the open door of the room. “After you,” he intoned.
Rodney walked ahead of John on rubbery legs. He’s wondering what you see in me, he wanted to say.
The irony was that they both knew there was nothing left to see.
Not long before the Wraith were due to wipe them out of existence, Rodney had himself pretty much convinced that Sheppard was attracted to him. It didn’t trouble him that this was probably a hallucination brought on by exhaustion and stimulants; he’d hold onto his little fantasy for as long as he could, which the way they were going wouldn’t be much longer anyway. Until then, he’d relish the smiles, the looks, the sarcastic barbs, and try to forget about the fact that he was probably never going to get laid again.
Then one night—morning—whatever—he’d been nodding off when a familiar drawl had startled him back to wakefulness. “Time for bed, Rodney.”
He blinked and took in his surroundings. Oh, yes; sometime around midnight the babble of the rest of the scientific team had forced him from the lab and back to the blessed silence of his quarters. He’d been on the verge of a breakthrough when his concentration had been destroyed by Kavanagh’s whining over the safety factor in their planned power-up of the city defenses. As if there was any safety left to be had. Safety was…nothing…no more…
“Rodney. Hey. Stand up, c’mon.” Warm, strong hands closed over his biceps and urged him to his feet.
Rodney concentrated on obeying Sheppard’s request, but his muscles took a great deal of time responding. Every part of his body felt heavy, weighted down by an excessive gravity. “Do you have any more pills?” he asked hopefully when they were face to face.
Sheppard nodded. “Yeah, but you’re not getting any more for a few hours yet.”
“Why not?” Rodney snapped. “I’m on the verge of a breakthrough.”
“Funny, you looked like you were on the verge of falling asleep on your keyboard.” John began pulling Rodney with him toward the bed, but Rodney dug in his heels.
“That’s why I need the stimulants,” he shot back.
“Look,” John said, suddenly sounding as weary as Rodney felt, “Beckett said no more jolts for a few hours at least. If you don’t get some rest, you’re going to keel over permanently.”
Rodney heard a burst of high-pitched, shaky laughter; it took him far too long to realize it was coming from his own throat. “More permanent than utter annihilation at the hands of soul-sucking aliens?”
“Let’s just say they’re tied for first place. Rodney—come on—” John made a grab for him, but Rodney had already twisted out of his grasp. Still unsteady on his feet, he staggered toward the nearest wall, relieved when he felt its solid weight against his back.
“Rodney, I have just spent the last seven hours teaching weapons drill to a dozen very frightened scientists. In six hours I have to get up and do it all over again with a dozen more.”
“That’s fine, you toddle off to bed, then,” Rodney said, flapping a hand at him in dismissal. “Just leave a few of those pills with me when you go.”
“Goddammit,” John growled, closing the distance between them in three long strides, “you are not getting any more pills until you get. Some. Rest.” His last words were punctuated with jabs of his index finger into Rodney’s chest. Suddenly furious, Rodney grabbed the offending hand and yanked hard, pulling Sheppard off-balance. Sheppard slammed his free hand against the wall to steady himself; Rodney looked up and was immediately pinned by the matching fury in Sheppard’s gaze. Normally filtered by a shield of affability, his emotions were momentarily molten and exposed, and Rodney felt them slam into his body like a burst of hard radiation, burning him from the inside out.
Which was ridiculous, he reasoned after a moment—you couldn’t feel hard radiation—
He was still holding tight to Sheppard’s hand, his own thick, square fingers curled tightly around Sheppard’s tapered ones. Sheppard didn’t pull away, just stood there staring at him.
“I don’t want to die,” Rodney whispered.
“Keep telling yourself that. It helps.” Rodney watched Sheppard’s gaze cool and harden. When Sheppard finally tried to pull his hand away, Rodney held fast.
“You don’t want to die either,” Rodney told him.
Sheppard rolled his eyes. “Rodney—”
“Say it.”
Sheppard had the audacity to smirk. “If I do, will you promise to go to bed?”
“Say it.”
John only looked at him, gaze completely still and shuttered.
“Oh my God,” Rodney said. “You don’t—”
Sheppard’s face was very close to Rodney’s; their voices were soft and conspiratorial, as though they sharing a secret no one else was privileged enough to know. “Look, I just don’t think saying it makes much difference one way or the other.”
“You just told me it did!” Rodney hissed.
“For you, Rodney,” John said patiently, as if to a small child. “It makes a difference for you. But when it comes down to it, the military mission here is to defend this city and protect the civilians.”
“I’m not—” Rodney spluttered, immediately feeling foolish, because yes, of course he was a civilian, not of the body; he’d been childish to ever think he was part of something worth dying for. Slowly, though, the true weight of Sheppard’s words sank in. “Wait, wait. You’re saying that it’s your job to—to die for us?”
One side of Sheppard’s mouth quirked. “Well, I’m definitely going to try to avoid it…”
“How can you joke about it? You’re saying you value Kavanagh’s life more highly than your own?”
John didn’t even blink. “Yes. That’s what we signed on for, and that’s what we trained to do.”
“God, Jesus, fuck,” Rodney breathed, because really, he’d known that was true intuitively, but to hear Sheppard say it so matter-of-factly made something in him start screaming. “I don’t want you dying for me. Do you hear me?”
“Got it,” Sheppard said with a smirk, though the uncharacteristic tightness of his voice contradicted it. “Do not perform acts of noble self-sacrifice to save Rodney McKay’s ass.”
And those words were enough to send Rodney over the brink into anger so intense that for once he couldn’t speak, couldn’t even splutter, because all the fury—at Sheppard for being so casual about it, at the Wraith for existing, at the fucking universe for not letting them have even one lousy half-charged ZPM—was choking him, stoppering his breath.
He was vaguely conscious of scattered fragments of reality and sensation: the synthetic slide of Sheppard’s jacket against his fingertips as he gripped it with both hands, the cool removal of those hazel eyes giving way to surprise and awareness, the shockingly quiet gasp Sheppard made as Rodney’s mouth covered his.
And suddenly the rage ebbed, yielding to renewed purpose, because maybe they were all going to die in a few days but Sheppard was warm and alive right now, pushing his tongue past Rodney’s lips and smoothing his palms down Rodney’s sides and groaning as Rodney arched into him. And even though Sheppard couldn’t bring himself to say the words, every touch, every kiss, every breath was an admission that only Rodney could hear.
I don’t want to die: broad, lewd swipe of a tongue along the cords of Rodney’s neck.
I don’t want to die: fingers splaying over Rodney’s bared hips, the pressure both maddeningly light and unbearably painful to touch-starved skin.
I don’t want to die: whisper of inarticulate sound rising from a lean throat as Rodney’s mouth closed over Sheppard’s cock, reveling in the undeniable proof that John Sheppard finally wanted something.
“Time for bed, Rodney.”
Rodney completed what must have been his eighth circuit of the room—the corners, he’d noted, were really incredibly dusty—and reluctantly looked over at John. He was stretched out fully dressed atop the covers on the right side of the bed, sitting with his arms folded and his feet together. His P90 and his Beretta lay on the floor within easy reach, and his knife sat unsheathed on the nightstand, blade gleaming in the lamplight.
A month ago they would have fallen on this bed like a gift from the gods, to hell with the dust and the possible insect life hidden in the sheets, because it was a whole order of magnitude bigger than either of their beds on Atlantis. They’d only just begun to explore the delights of horizontal sex (not to mention those to be found in taking more than five minutes to get off) when Rodney had screwed it all up, neatly destroying both space and time in one fell swoop.
John shifted on the bed and sighed when Rodney remained motionless. “Look, this bed is big enough for three people. It’s big enough for Ronon. Will you just lie down already?”
“I—all right,” Rodney said, suddenly weary, because here he was mooning over his lost love like some maudlin teenager while his lost love was lying there completely unaffected by any of it, and while being the less mature one in the relationship was not a new role for him, he had to admit it did get exhausting. With as much dignity as he could muster considering the tail tucked between his legs, he walked over to the bed and climbed up on it, then removed his sidearm as Sheppard had done and lay back. He imagined he felt John’s gaze on him before the other man turned over and blew out the lamp.
The silence stretched, and Rodney assumed that John had fallen asleep. He himself stared up into the blackness, letting his eyes adjust. He’d always had fairly good night vision as a child, though it had been ruined by thousands of hours spent in front of brightly lit computer monitors. Really, it was too bad, because it would have been nice to have one useful survival skill.
“Rodney, go to sleep,” John muttered, startling the hell out of him.
“I was asleep,” he hissed.
“You weren’t. You were staring up at the ceiling.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Rodney snapped, rolling to face him, even more irritated when all he could make out was a vaguely human-shaped silhouette. “Will you stop—taking care of me!”
He heard John shift toward him. “I can’t help it,” he admitted softly. “It’s become a nasty habit.”
“Habits are meant to be broken.”
“Rodney,” John said, and there was no drawl in it, just two short, efficient syllables, and goddammit, he didn’t care if it made him a teenager, he missed the way John used to say his name.
“Listen, just, please,” he murmured, hating the whine in his own voice, “just—let me stare at the ceiling for a while. I’ll sleep eventually.”
“I’m sorry,” John murmured after a moment. “I shouldn’t have…I didn’t know…fuck.” Rodney watched John’s shadowy presence sit up abruptly and swing his legs over the side of the bed.
“Where are you going?”
John scrubbed a hand over his face; Rodney caught the motion of the arm and the soft scritch-scritch of skin against stubble. “I should take a look around the building, check the entrances, make sure they’re secure.”
“Oh,” Rodney said, at a loss. “You’re not—going outside?”
“Alone? No. Just want to make sure we’re all snug in our beds for the night.”
“Oh,” Rodney said again. He didn’t point out that their hosts were probably well aware of the dangers of unlocked doors. “Well. I’ll probably be asleep by the time you get back.”
“Yeah, that’s good.” John stood, turned back toward the bed; Rodney knew John was looking at him, knew John probably could see him a hell of a lot better than he could see John. “Good night.”
And Rodney, never terribly gifted with insight into the human condition, had a sudden epiphany. Perhaps some part of John, at least, had wanted to be close to Rodney tonight, even if it was just lying on separate halves of a mattress.
And Rodney had just fucked it up. Again.
He wanted to tell John that it was all right to want this, but he’d forfeited the right to tell John anything, and he wasn’t entirely sure that it was all right. Rodney couldn’t fathom self-denial; he had always thought the hearty helping of rejection served up by an indifferent universe was more than enough for a person to have to deal with. Ultimately, he supposed he didn’t understand John at all.
Not that that had prevented Rodney from falling in love with him.
“Good night, John,” Rodney said quietly, keeping his eyes open until John was completely swallowed by the darkness.
End
September 2005
Part VIII: Evolution
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