by lamardeuse
Rated: NC-17 for language and sexual situations
A/N: Thanks to misspamela
for a fabulous beta.
If Rodney took time to think
about it—which given the million other things he was tasked with thinking
about, wasn’t likely to happen anytime soon—he would have realized it
sooner.
As it was, it took a dying man’s words to alert him to the inescapable
fact that he had, in fact, changed. At some point, he had
stopped being one of the guys who hid under his desk when the scary stuff
happened. He wasn’t a hero by any means, but he could occasionally
be prone to fits of unscheduled bravery.
To be fair, recent events tended to skew his perspective at first.
The truth was that he was spending more of his life terrified rather
than less, but this was so only because the frequency of terror-inducing
stimuli had increased dramatically since his entry into the Pegasus galaxy.
Not only the quantity: the quality of said terror had also
been heightened. Where before his greatest fear had been whether
he’d jab the Epipen into his leg fast enough after mistakenly ingesting
a sliver of orange rind, now there were about a dozen nightmares competing
for the top spot, each of them spectacularly horrific in their own way.
One of them was the fear that he’d die a coward.
And that was where the change really, for want of a more intellectual
metaphor, knocked him on his ass. A few months ago, he’d never have
considered that “death without honour” would ever be on a par with “death
from soul-sucking alien,” but at some point the collective weight of the
courage of everyone around him had borne him to the ground, grinding him
into the dirt. And that wasn’t a position Rodney McKay was used to.
He’d always looked down, not up, but when the laws of aerodynamics changed
to include self-sacrifice and stoicism, he was forced to hammer out a new
set of wings for himself.
The turning point had been obvious; it had been when Kolya had broken
him with pathetic ease, though Rodney had always known his weakness was
knives, because he had nightmares about getting his throat cut and after
they’d made him bleed they’d laid the flat of the blade against his jugular
and oh God, oh God he just couldn’t—
Anyway. That in and of itself would have been bad enough, but
it was unflatteringly juxtaposed with the discovery that Major John Sheppard
was not only an Air Force pilot but also an extremely competent and cold-blooded
killer. Major Sheppard had, it would seem, been trained in tactics
that were outside the scope of what Rodney knew of regular military training.
Major Sheppard had skills. Major Sheppard could dispatch
sixty of his fellow human beings and not blink an eye. While it
wasn’t something Rodney wanted to aspire to per se, Sheppard’s conduct
during the occupation of Atlantis tended to throw his own lack of backbone
into sharp relief.
So where did that leave him? Well, he was still looking up, but
maybe he wasn’t always getting a crick in his neck from the steepness of
the angle. He stepped forward instead of stepping back; he acted on
instinct rather than logic; he did really stupid shit like emptying 9 mm
clips into Wraith he knew he couldn’t kill. Even worse considering his
past history, there was not a lot in it for him, because there was no way
for him to win on this playing field given the strength of the competition.
But when it came to his newly hatched bravery, he didn’t care about being
the best, only about being good enough. About being worthy of the rest
of them.
For a while he consoled himself with the thought that it was a form
of vanity, after all. It wasn’t really courage if you just didn’t
want to be the only guy with brown trousers when everything went to hell.
The third time he was wakened by the sound of a single gunshot, he
knew there was more to it.
There had been a comfort in being one of the ones allowed to hide under
the desk. Despite his vaunted intelligence, Rodney hadn’t realized
until now that a decision he thought was solely personal and selfish was
in fact a burden, a responsibility so basic it was beyond comprehension.
But the simple truth was this: the moment you stood on your own two
feet, there were others who would look up to you, who would expect you to
shield them, who would expect you to save them.
He was used to being counted on to do his job, to figure out a new
algorithm, to come up with a new way of looking at the universe.
He didn’t know if he could handle being counted on to keep people alive.
Because so far, it didn’t look like he was doing such a terrific job
of it.
John finished page thirty-three right on schedule. Okay, so it
was better than Fathers and Sons, but keeping track of the characters
was going to be a real headache. Maybe he could draw up a family
tree and tack it to the wall over his bed; he’d get another week out of
the novel if he took his time with it.
He set War and Peace on his nightstand and palmed the light.
As his eyes closed, he heard the knock.
Another knock came before he could speak. “Major? Are you
awake?”
John couldn’t stop the smirk. “And if I say no?”
There was a pause. “Never mind. It’s not—urgent.”
John frowned; coming from McKay, that was tantamount to a groveling
apology. He willed the door to open; it slid to reveal Rodney
as John palmed the light back on.
Rodney’s mouth opened. “How did you do that?”
“I’ve been practicing,” John drawled, sitting up. “Is that what
you came to ask me about?”
Rodney took a step forward and opened his mouth again. Then,
to John’s shock and awe, he closed it.
“Rodney, are you all right?”
Rodney’s gaze shifted from John’s face to a spot on the wall above
his head. “I—uh. I keep dreaming. About Brendan.
Gaul.”
Close, John thought, and the door obeyed graciously. Rodney
still wasn’t looking at him. “Why don’t you sit down,” John said
heavily. He’d known this was coming, read it in McKay’s increasingly
haggard appearance over the past week. John could sympathize with
Rodney, he really could, but he’d had this conversation with a dozen junior
officers in the past, not to mention with himself about a hundred fucking
times over the course of his career, and he was getting heartily sick of
the same damned pep talk.
He told himself that Rodney hadn’t signed up for this; the responsibility,
if not of command, then of being the guy whose decisions might lead to
someone other than himself dying. That wasn’t a scenario they taught
you in physics class. But that was bullshit, too, because until you’d
had it happen to you, you had no idea what you were signing up for.
Rodney sat, to John’s mild surprise, beside him on the bed, close but
not too close. He folded his hands in his lap and stared at them.
“I keep hearing the shot. Seeing him lying there, with—” He
cut himself off; one hand flopped aimlessly, then lay still, as if it too
had given up hope of explaining what was in Rodney’s head.
John studied the side of Rodney’s face, the muscle leaping in his clenched
jaw, the sweep of his lashes as he blinked at his unusually quiet hands.
He thought back to those dozens, hundreds of conversations, and wondered
why this one had to be the same.
The thought came swiftly: it didn’t have to be.
Those other guys he talked to had to reconcile themselves to their role;
Rodney didn’t have to take it on, period.
“I know what Gaul looked like,” John heard himself snap. “I brought
the body out.”
Rodney’s chest rose, then fell. “How do you—live with it?”
“With what?” John demanded, knowing what the answer was going to be
and hoping against hope that Rodney wouldn’t say it.
“With—thinking about the decisions we made. Thinking about what
we could have done differently. I mean, I just keep playing it over
and over and over, what if, what if—” Rodney scrubbed a hand over his face.
“God, I—wish we could go back and do it all over again, get it right this
time. I know it’s ridiculous, but I can’t help it.”
John didn’t react. “There was no other decision to make.
I acted on the intel we had; the intel was sound at the time.”
“But we shouldn’t have left them—”
“What’s this ‘we’ business, McKay?” John said coldly.
Rodney turned to him then, his generous mouth falling open slightly
in surprise. John held his gaze and concentrated on being the bastard
he’d been trained to be.
“Let’s get one thing straight: there is no ‘we.’ I
was commanding that mission, and I made the decisions as to who would go
with who, and who would do what. I was the sole military representative.
You were not responsible for anything that happened on that mission.”
Rodney flinched, and not in relief. “But I—”
“Guilt isn’t your style, Rodney,” John told him, hating himself a little
more. “Why don’t you go back to what you’re good at?”
To John’s surprise, Rodney didn’t yell or rant or rave. He stared
at John as though he’d forgotten where he was, like a kid who’d lost his
mom in the mall. Then he got up without a word and headed for the door.
Open, John thought. The door obeyed him without question.
Upon reflection, it would have been fun to lord this one over him.
But if Sheppard died, there wouldn’t be much opportunity for gloating.
“McKay!” John was shouting. “Rodney! Don’t come any closer!”
This time there was no selfish motive behind his actions—well, apart
from the potential gloating, of course. They’d walked through the
gate, not flown through it, and there was nothing sinister on this planet
that required Major Sheppard’s special skills. No, this was simply
John misjudging the alien terrain and causing an unstable section of cliff
to collapse under him, causing him in turn to be hanging by his fingernails
off a likely similarly unstable section of cliff. Even if Rodney could
get off on being a hero, he’d have to settle for hero by default. Ford and
Teyla had gone off to explore another area and even at top speed wouldn’t
be here for another few minutes.
“I mean it, goddammit!” Sheppard yelled. “The whole thing is
likely to go.”
“The whole thing will definitely go if you don’t grab onto my
goddamn hand right now,” Rodney yelled back, wiggling his fingers
in an impatient manner near John’s face. He was now lying flat on
the ground with his legs spread, reasoning that if he distributed his weight
over as much surface as possible, he was less likely to cause another rock
slide. He was hoping that once John grabbed onto him, he’d just let
him use his body like a ladder, because there was no way that Rodney would
have the strength to pull him up, even with the jolt of adrenaline.
Rodney always figured those tales of superhuman strength under extreme
duress were embellished anyway; it was highly unlikely that—
“Rodney. Move away from the cliff now. That
is an order.”
And suddenly, at the most inopportune time, that humiliating incident
in Sheppard’s quarters last week finally came into sharp focus, and Rodney
could see all the hard, brittle edges of the Major’s words for what they
were, or at least what he hoped they were, because you could never really
be sure of another person’s—
“Rodney!”
Right. Right. Focus. Rodney moved his hand
to a spot beside John’s, where the Major could latch onto it easily.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m done arguing with you. This is my
hand. I suggest you let go of the ledge for no more than five thousandths
of a second before getting ahold of it, or gravity will become even more of
a problem for you than it is now.”
“Everything’s—physics with you—isn’t it?” John grunted.
“Nearly everything. Now. On three?”
“Rodney.”
“Yes?”
“Shut up,” John told him, and then he took a deep breath, and then
he grabbed Rodney’s hand and held on.
“We have to talk,” Sheppard said as he breezed past Rodney. Rodney
wouldn’t have minded quite so much if it hadn’t been three in the morning,
if he hadn’t been wakened from a sound sleep, and if he hadn’t worn his
ratty old Red Dwarf t-shirt to bed.
“Why certainly, Major, come right in,” he intoned dryly. “Mi
casa es su casa, as they say, although considering the last words you
spoke to me were ‘shut up’, I don’t know how you expect me to—”
“Shut up, Rodney.”
“Oh, for God’s—make up your mind, will you?”
“Okay. I’ll talk. You listen.”
“Now wait a minute—”
John spun around, and suddenly his face was about an inch from Rodney’s.
“Don’t worry, I’m going to give you the short version. Trying repeatedly
to sacrifice your own life will not bring Gaul and Abrams back.”
Rodney folded his arms, though he had to step back a little to find
the space to do it. “Are you sure you shouldn’t be giving yourself
that advice? That was a pretty amateur stunt this afternoon.”
“I’ve gotten people killed before,” John said, his lip twisting in
a chilling parody of his normal smile. “It’s not a new feeling.”
Rodney pressed his own lips together, though inside his heart was trying
to hammer its way out of his chest. Don’t sweat, for Chrissakes
don’t sweat. “I’m not trying to sacrifice myself. I’m just
trying to do what’s right. And if I hadn’t done what I did today,
you’d probably be dead.”
“You’re not responsible for me or anyone else—”
Rodney shook his head. “Forget it. You tried that one already
and I don’t believe it. I’m part of your team. I may not be
Rambo, but I’m going to pull my own weight as best I can.”
“By playing the hero.”
“Goddammit,” Rodney spat, unknotting his arms and clenching his fists,
“I’m not playing at anything! The Wraith, the Genii, the
continent-spanning hurricanes, the inescapable fact that we could die
in a million spectacularly unpleasant ways—all of these are real!”
“And you contribute more than your fair share by finding scientific
solutions to those problems, and you do a damned good job of it. But
you’re not military, Rodney; you don’t have the training.”
“Then train me,” Rodney heard himself say. God, what was he doing?
“I can exercise more—maybe Teyla can show me that trick with the sticks—”
“Jesus Christ,” Sheppard roared, “why do you want this so much?”
“I don’t know!” Rodney yelled back. “Don’t you think I’ve been
trying to figure that out? I mean, look at me—I had a one hundred
percent average in every math and science course I took in high school
and I almost failed phys ed! Before I came here, I had shot a gun
exactly three times and two of those times I was trying to impress girls
on the carnival midway.”
“Did you impress them?” Sheppard asked, one eyebrow quirking.
“Not unless you count a cheap plastic toy which can only be detected
by an electron microscope to be impressive.”
John shook his head slowly, his mouth clearly fighting a smile, and
Rodney had the overwhelming urge to beat him senseless. He was only
stopped by the knowledge that he probably wouldn’t even land a single punch.
He took a deep breath, let it out. “Let me ask you something,”
Rodney said, as slowly as he could. “Why does it always have to
be your job?”
John stared at him for a long moment. For once, Rodney wished
he had paid more attention to the behaviour of his fellow human beings,
because he couldn’t tell what the hell that look meant. Finally, Sheppard
said, “Because whether you like it or not, Rodney, when we go out on a
mission it is my job, and no one else’s. And because it’s not what
everybody tells you it is. It’s not a fucking movie, with medals and
ticker tape parades and the thanks of a grateful nation. It’s lying
alone at night and wondering what you could have done. Wishing you
could turn back the clock and do it all differently, even though you know
it’s ridiculous.”
“Major, I—”
“I’m sorry I woke you up,” John said softly, and suddenly he was the
guy he’d been before Rodney saw him efficiently kill sixty people, only
infinitely more weary.
“John.” Sheppard looked up at him, startled, though no more than
Rodney was.
“What?” John asked warily.
Rodney sighed. “Nothing. Never mind. I’m the last
person to be offering emotional support. Only—I only want to say that
I understand. Some of it.”
John shook his head sadly. “I hope like hell you never get to
understand all of it,” he said, and then he walked around Rodney and let
himself out.
John leaned against the door to the gym and took in the tableau before
him. Teyla was standing over Rodney, looking down at his flushed
and sweating face. His furry knees were bent, his feet flat on the
mat. The fighting sticks were braced across his chest, wobbling up
and down with the expansion and contraction of his lungs.
“Doctor, I believe that is enough for today,” Teyla said gently.
Rodney rolled sideways, gasping as he put weight on his shoulder.
“I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine,” he babbled, waving a hand. “One more
round.”
“You have done very well for this session,” Teyla was saying, ignoring
him, “but I would counsel—”
“I’m ready to go,” Rodney persisted, rising a little shakily to his
feet. He turned and caught sight of John, then straightened even further.
Both men winced automatically at the distinct cracking sound.
“Teyla,” John drawled, “have you broken Rodney again?”
She shot him one of her patented wry looks. “Doctor McKay is
becoming a worthy opponent,” she told him. “But he still needs to
learn his own limits.”
“Yeah,” John agreed, keeping his eyes on Teyla. “He doesn’t know
when to quit.”
“Hello? I’m still in the room, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Why don’t you let me tire him out,” John said, leaning in closer to
Teyla. “That way if he has a stroke you won’t have to live with
the guilt.”
Teyla raised her eyebrows to show she was above such low amusement,
though her eyes twinkled with merriment. She nodded, and turned back
to McKay. “Thank you for an excellent workout, Doctor.” She
inclined her head, then handed John her sticks and left them alone.
John caught the shadowed flicker of panic in Rodney’s eyes as they
faced off. He made his smile as predatory as possible, and was grimly
pleased to see the flicker reappear.
“Yes, yes, you have the psychological advantage too,” Rodney snapped.
“Happy?”
“Ecstatic.” He threw the sticks aside. Rodney watched them
clatter to the floor.
“What are you—”
“Wraith don’t fight with sticks,” John said, and pounced.
To his credit, Rodney lasted nearly a minute. He was quicker
than John expected him to be, and he landed a good hit on John’s right
wrist when he made a move for Rodney’s throat. There’d be a bruise
there tomorrow.
That didn’t alter the fact that at the end of that minute, Rodney was
disarmed and pinned under John’s body. He struggled for a moment,
then abruptly lay still, and John felt the capitulation like a stunner blast.
“Rodney—” he began.
Rodney squeezed his eyes shut. “Get off me. Please.”
John obeyed, and Rodney heaved himself to his feet. Half-turned
away from John, he said, “You’ve proven your point.”
John stared at him; he hadn’t thought Rodney would give up that easily.
But isn’t that what you were hoping for?
Rodney captured John’s gaze with his own, and it struck him that Rodney
had finally been broken, but not by Teyla. “Look, you’re getting better,”
he said, while inside his head a voice was screaming at him to shut
up. “Just give it some time…”
Rodney barked a harsh laugh. “Yes, I’m sure in time I’ll manage
to become a danger to others as well as myself.”
“That’s not what I—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rodney murmured, turning the sticks over in his
hands, then setting them down carefully beside the others. As he
headed for the door, he turned and said, “Congratulations, Major.
Once again, you’re the only one left standing.”
Rodney came through the Gate with the same sense of disorientation
he always experienced, only this time it was as though he’d been turned
inside out as well as upside down. The same mindless litany that had
been running through his head in an endless loop for the last twenty minutes
droned on as he stumbled down the ramp, eyes fixed on the phantom image of
a body falling over and over again.
I think I killed him, oh jesus I did I killed another human being
oh shit—
Somewhere far away he heard running footsteps, Elizabeth’s voice, John’s
voice, both speaking quickly, the words disjointed and jumbled:
skirmish small scouting party
Genii exchanged fire. And then there
was a hand on his arm, and he slowly raised his head. Teyla was holding
onto him, her touch firm and strong, and her gaze too damned understanding
for him to hold it together for long.
“Come,” she said softly. “I will take you to see Doctor Beckett
now.”
Rodney looked away when he felt tears prick his eyes. “Will that
help?”
A pause. “Probably not,” Teyla admitted.
“Fine,” Rodney breathed, forcing his feet to move. “As long as
we’re agreed on that.”
When the debriefing was over and John had convinced Elizabeth to leave
Rodney the hell alone, at least for the next couple of days, he debated
following his own advice, then vetoed it. He’d already FUBARed the
whole situation; what was another mistake now?
Rodney’s eyes were red-rimmed and hollow when he answered the door,
and John felt like twenty kinds of shit with a few more thrown in for good
measure. “Yes, I suspected it was you,” Rodney snapped. “I thought
to myself, ‘How could this day possibly get any worse?’ and then you showed
up. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.”
“There was nothing else you could have done,” John blurted, figuring
he’d get the main point out of the way quickly since Rodney was going
to close the door on him any second.
“Yes, there was. There were at least three other things.
I could have yelled at Ford to duck—”
John shook his head. “He might not have reacted in time.
Teyla said the guy was about to shoot—”
“—I could have let you take the shot—”
“—I wasn’t even aiming at him, my gun was pointed in the opposite direction,
we were in a two-way ambush—”
“—and I could have aimed for something that wouldn’t have killed him!
A leg, an arm, his left fucking foot!” Out of the corner of his eye John
detected a Marine walking by who gave them a curious look, but thankfully
continued on his way.
John leaned in closer, lowering his voice. “The first thing you
learn in weapons training is to aim for the center of mass. Teyla,
Ford or I would have done the exact same thing, and the guy would have been
just as dead as he is now.”
Rodney folded his arms across his chest and took a step back.
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t—I can’t—”
Taking advantage of Rodney’s retreat, John stepped into the room and
willed the door to close behind him. “You did, and you can,” he
said firmly, watching as his hands closed around Rodney’s elbows.
He gave Rodney a gentle shake, and watched the top of his bent head wobble
slightly. “I know how it sounds, but you did the right thing.
The team needed you, Rodney, and we were damned glad you were there.”
Rodney raised his head slowly. When his gaze was aimed right
at John, there was certainly no overt warning that he was about to—
“Son-of-a-bitch,” Rodney growled, hauling back and landing a
solid right hook on John’s jaw just as the last word hit the air.
“Ow! Fuck!” John said, because, well, that hurt, and maybe
he’d deserved it, but man. And then he was struggling to keep
his feet under him, because Rodney was shoving him backward roughly, strength
John didn’t know the scientist possessed propelling them until his back
landed thunk! against a wall, and—
“Ow! Fuck!” John repeated, because it bore repeating.
“The team needed me?” Rodney growled. “Oh, so now I’m
part of the team? For how long, Major? Until the next
time I blow a hole in someone, and then you’ll decide I’ve had enough
of playing the hero—” He punctuated his words with shoves
of John’s shoulders against the wall “—and I’ll be left in limbo again?”
“I’m not going to—”
“Shut up,” Rodney snapped. “I’ve heard enough of what you have
to say. Don’t you think I know it’s going to change me? It
already has, and most of the time it scares the living shit out of me.
But if I don’t change, I don’t have a hope in hell of surviving. I
don’t have a hope in hell of holding my head up with the rest of
you.”
John frowned. “It’s not a competition.”
“I know that!” Rodney snapped. “Do you realize this is the first
time I’ve attempted something new knowing there was no way I was going
to excel at it? I’m perfectly well aware that I’m one of the most
inadequate warriors who ever walked the corridors of Atlantis. But
I have to try, because most days I walk around feeling like I—I’m only half
of what I need to be. I suppose that doesn’t make any sense to a professional
hero like you, does it?”
John stared at Rodney, at his flushed, haggard face only inches from
his own, and thought this would be a really bad time to pick to have a
nervous breakdown.
But he couldn’t seem to help himself.
Because it made perfect sense to him. Fuck, he’d been living
it since he fired the shot that put Sumner out of his misery, and that
was a long time to spend hanging by his fingernails.
He was dimly aware that Rodney had let go of him, because he could
feel the friction against his back as he slid slowly to the floor.
He could hear Rodney saying his name in a panicky voice, but he couldn’t
be bothered to answer right away.
And then he felt Rodney’s warmth pressing along his side, and Rodney
was babbling, “Oh thank God, you get it, I’m not alone, thank God.”
John drew his knees up to his chest and rested his forehead on them.
He took deep, calming breaths and fought the conflicting but equally unpleasant
sensations that he was about to either float away or sink to the bottom
of the ocean.
“Yeah,” he said shakily, “I get it.”
Rodney shifted beside him, moving away, and John’s heart leapt.
“No. Just—can you—”
“Okay,” Rodney murmured, and the warmth returned, “okay, yeah.
Good idea.”
After that, things started to get strange.
Well, granted, ‘strange’ was the mildest of words to describe just
about every experience in the Pegasus galaxy, but their behaviour toward
one another had never fit that term. The way they interacted was
fairly similar to the interactions Rodney had had with gorgeous, popular
jocks in high school, the main difference being that he wasn’t getting stuffed
in lockers any more. The verbal self-defense they used on one another
was familiar, comforting; it kept them at opposite ends of the cafeteria,
where they belonged.
And now? Now when they went out on a mission Rodney found himself
touching John almost as often as John touched him, which was often enough
for Teyla to start giving them private, Cheshire smiles whenever she caught
them at it. Hell, Ford was starting to notice, and while Ford
was probably okay, once it got around that the military CO of Atlantis liked
touching other guys, John’s career was going right down the toilet.
It wasn’t like there was anything inappropriate about them—at most there’d
be a brief, guiding nudge on the arm, a slap on the back, a clap on the
shoulder—but Rodney knew he ought to talk to John about it.
He ought to talk to John about it, but he didn’t; he let it go for
weeks, weeks where they went out on missions and walked in one another’s
orbits, breathed in the same air, completed one another’s sentences, moved
in perfect synch. And when they were home, John spent an inordinate
amount of time in Rodney’s lab, poking at things and generally making a
nuisance of himself. And the most insane thing about this was that
Rodney didn’t mind. He put John to work and soon found the
Major knew more than he ever could have guessed about power systems and
thermodynamics, and that made Rodney want to touch him even more, and oh
God, he was so screwed. But Rodney had never had anything
like this before with anyone; no way in hell was he going to give
that up simply because it was the Right Thing To Do. Besides, he rationalized,
since when was it his responsibility to look out for John’s career?
And then he’d been without John the one time when it really counted,
the one time when his brain was about to turn into soup from a deadly
Ancient virus, and he ached, literally ached with John’s absence.
He alternated between rabid bouts of terror and a fervent desire that John
was here with him, keeping him company, keeping him grounded. Which
when he had time to think about it was wrong on so many levels that it
scared the shit out of him even more than the thought of certain death
had. Because even if John had been in a HAZMAT suit, what kind of
sick weirdo wanted someone around so they could watch you die?
Apparently he had turned into just such a weirdo. And that wasn’t
good for either of them, he reasoned. So he stopped touching John,
even though it was like what he imagined drug withdrawal would feel like;
some nights he woke up sweating and shivering, sheets tangled around his
legs as though he’d been running for his life.
Eventually John took the hint and stopped coming around the lab, and
when they went on missions they stayed as far away from one another as
possible, unless they were arguing. Rodney noticed the arguments
had taken on a sharp, desperate edge, like they were trying to shout through
the distance between them, trying to find a way to plug back into that
seamless connection.
It didn’t work. And then John found somebody who was perfectly
willing to touch him, and everything went to hell.
This time, John found Rodney still on his feet, legs apart and body
in a defensive crouch as he faced Teyla. The determined look on her
face found a matching one on McKay’s face, only his was a lot sweatier.
A few choice images from last night’s dream came to him; coincidentally,
Rodney had been fairly sweaty in that situation too. Only he’d been
wearing a lot less.
John forced his gaze to switch to Teyla. God, when the hell had
she become the safer choice?
“You are improving, Doctor,” Teyla cooed, and the sound of Teyla cooing
was something not to be missed. “I believe we should arrange a meeting
between you and my brother; you are evenly matched now.”
“Yeah?” Rodney said. “How old is your brother?”
Teyla grinned. “Fourteen.”
To John’s surprise, Rodney barked a laugh at that. “Nice try.”
He stepped to his left, and Teyla followed his movements like a hawk scenting
prey.
Holy shit. They were serious.
Teyla lunged suddenly; Rodney parried with some effort, but John could
tell it wasn’t everything he had to give. Their sticks clashed against
one another for a moment, and then Rodney twisted his sticks counterclockwise
and shoved her away.
Okay, John told his dick, looking down and treating it to a
stern look. This is a really bad time to be doing that.
Not that the other time it had happened recently had been a really
great time either, he mused. Chaya’s sweet demeanour and beautiful
eyes had reminded him he hadn’t had sex with anything but his hand since
coming to the Pegasus galaxy, but it had taken a juvenile shouting match
with Rodney in the hallway to remind him what it felt like to want to
start humping someone’s leg. Well, okay, so he hadn’t had that urge
since he was a teenager, but Rodney had an unfailing talent for bringing
out the delinquent in him.
“May I cut in?” John heard himself ask. Teyla turned around and
looked right through his skin, and he could tell she knew he wasn’t offering
to replace Rodney in this dance.
“Of course,” she said, inclining her head to both of them. “Thank
you, Rodney.”
Rodney bowed to her and smiled, his chest heaving only slightly.
John tried not to jump him right there.
Rodney remained still for long moments after Teyla had left, his eyes
on the door. John stood a safe distance away and wished he knew what
Rodney was thinking, wished he knew what to say.
“You’re back, then, are you?” Rodney said finally, eyes still on anything
but John. “I thought maybe you two were going to set up housekeeping
in a little cabin in the woods. You know, something small but with
a spectacular view of the temple. She’d have an easy commute to work,
you could iron her robes and grovel at her feet…”
“I, uh,” John said, uncharacteristically at a loss for words, because
he’d just seen how serious Rodney was, and for once he couldn’t find
a way to make light of it. “It, uh, wasn’t like that. We just
kind of—”
“Sorry, sorry,” Rodney interrupted, shaking his head violently.
“I didn’t mean to give you the impression that I cared.”
“Rodney. Nothing happened. Well, nothing that involved
us—you know,” he said, with a lame wave of his hand. “See, there
was this glow, and then she—” He trailed off when Rodney turned toward
him.
Rodney was—he couldn’t tell what Rodney was. The man was
usually an open book, every emotion that he was feeling and a few he’d been
feeling three hours ago showing up on his expressive features. But
today he looked—
God. It was like looking in a mirror.
Very carefully, Rodney walked to the edge of the mat, where he laid
his sticks down on the bench. John watched his bare feet with their
neatly squared-off toes as they approached, then forced himself to look
up.
He barely had time to put his own sticks down before Rodney pounced.
John’s brain instantly kicked into fight mode, which tended to help
him break reality into discrete elements based on the level of threat.
So a bird twittering in a tree was ignored, while the sound of a twig breaking
behind him brought all his senses to maximum alert. Right now he was
having trouble achieving that level of focus, though, because pretty much
everything related to Rodney was capturing his full attention; the sweat
beading Rodney’s cockeyed upper lip was assigned the same priority as the
foot aiming for his kneecap, and that just wasn’t an effective way to gain
the upper hand. No, in fact if John had been fighting for his life,
he would have been an easy target, because he had obviously relinquished
control of his higher brain functions to his dick.
And then Rodney’s foot almost collided with said contents, and he leapt
out of the way just in time. “Hey!” he yelled, crouching down and
raising his hands. “Where the hell did you pick that up?”
Rodney grinned an evil grin, and John prayed for strength. “I’ve
been taking extra lessons in hand-to-hand combat from Ford.”
And John knew exactly the kind of hand-to-hand lessons Ford would have
given him: dirty, desperate tactics for when you didn’t give a shit
about being an officer and a gentleman, only about surviving long enough
to jam the other guy’s nasal bone into his brain. Of course, none
of that stuff would work on the Wraith. But it would still give you
an edge, because a guy who felt confident with only his hands to save him
felt like the baddest motherfucker in the valley, and you needed that ingredient
to go up against some really bad motherfuckers.
Rodney’s next kick aimed a little too high, and John’s hands shot out
to capture the ankle. He yanked up sharply and Rodney yelped and toppled.
John stared stupidly as Rodney immediately tucked into a roll and was on
his feet facing him in the next second.
“Huh,” John managed, but that was all he got out before Rodney barreled
into his midsection and sent them both flying.
He landed flat on the mat with Rodney on top of him, forcing the air
from his lungs in an explosive whoosh. Before he could move, Rodney
had pinned his wrists to the mat and was leaning his upper body against
his arms to keep them there.
“No—fair,” John wheezed. I was distracted by your upper lip,
he wanted to add.
“There is no more fair, Major,” Rodney growled, and shit, Rodney
was sitting on his stomach, all he had to do was lean back a little and
he’d—
“Okay, great job, Rodney, hooray for you,” he snapped. “Can you
get off me now?”
“Not yet,” Rodney said, smiling as he pushed against John’s wrists
a little harder. “I’m kind of enjoying this.”
So am I, John thought, biting back a groan and praying for a
swift death.
And then Rodney leaned back, ass brushing against John’s dick as it
strained toward him. He frowned, confused, pressed back again experimentally.
Rodney’s eyes grew round as saucers, and suddenly he looked like himself
again, because John had seen that look on his face a hundred times, that
golly gee whiz wow look he got when something they found in the
Pegasus galaxy turned out to be cool and interesting instead of creepy
and lethal.
Whoo-hoo, thought John. Rodney has discovered my dick.
“You—uh,” Rodney murmured intelligently. “You—is that—”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” John snapped, finally remembering some of the
stuff he’d learned and twisting his hips to the right, bucking a startled
Rodney sideways. At the same time, he stretched his arms out as far
as he could and watched Rodney’s horrified face come closer as he fell forward.
Rodney swore and scrambled to let go of John’s wrists, and that was
all the opening John needed. He shoved at Rodney’s right shoulder
and within a couple of seconds Rodney was lying flat on his back, his gaze
riveted to John’s.
John leaned over him, careful not to touch any part of him, because
he needed every brain cell to be behind him on this. “How come you
get to be pissed off, anyway?” he snarled. “You were the one who stopped,
not me.”
“I—thought it would be—” He winced. “Best.”
“You thought it would be best? Who died and made you God?”
John leaned down until his face was inches from Rodney’s, until Rodney
had to get a little cross-eyed to keep him in focus. “You think you
can just waltz in and cut people open and then waltz away again when you’ve
gotten what you wanted out of the experiment?”
Rodney had the grace to look horrified at that. “I didn’t mean
to—that wasn’t—”
“What the hell did you think would happen? Did you think I’d
say, hey, thanks for making me think maybe there was some chance I wasn’t—”
He stopped, suddenly horrified at himself.
“Alone?” Rodney supplied helpfully.
“Don’t put words in my mouth!”
“Sorry, sorry,” Rodney murmured, raising one hand in a placating gesture.
John hadn’t given him much room for elaborate hand gestures, though, so
his fingers inadvertently brushed against John’s arm, sliding over the
sweat-slick skin.
Rodney looked at John. John looked at Rodney. This close,
John could see the fine growth of stubble on Rodney’s cheeks and chin, see
the eagerness evenly mixed with terror in his eyes.
Rodney’s fingers closed around John’s bicep as tight as a pressure
bandage stanching a wound. John squeezed his eyes shut and groaned.
“Can we stop talking now?” Rodney asked hoarsely.
“Works for me,” John agreed, closing the final distance between them
to claim Rodney’s mouth in a graceless, messy kiss.
Rodney’s trip through the wormhole from Earth to Atlantis, though nearly
instantaneous in relativistic terms, seemed at the time to be the longest
trip he’d ever taken in his life.
The walk—staggering, lust-drunk run, whatever—from the gym to John’s
quarters beat intergalactic travel all to hell, because his dick kept
asking Are we there yet? Are we there yet? until Rodney
wanted to drag John into the nearest convenient supply closet.
But then, he reminded himself, it was a hell entirely of his own making.
Some perverse impulse had prompted Rodney to put things on hold until
they could attain some measure of privacy; John would have been perfectly
content to rub against Rodney right there on the gym floor until both
of them were rendered very, very happy. And his shocking disregard
for decorum persisted all the way down the hall to the transporter, where
John stroked the back of Rodney’s damp neck, and in the transporter itself,
where John shoved Rodney against the wall and braced his hands above his
head and kissed him and kissed him, and down another hall to John’s quarters,
which had only been chosen because they were fifty feet closer to the transporter
than Rodney’s quarters, and if either of them had had to wait another minute
they would have gone crazy with it.
As John willed the door closed—god, why was that such a turn-on?—and
backed Rodney toward his bed, it occurred to Rodney that he had to be
at least half-crazy already, because what the hell was he thinking, believing
he could have this? Even if John was a gift he was allowed to open
today, who knew if he was going to be taken back tomorrow, returned to the
dust of the cosmos like Gaul and Abrams and too many others?
And then John’s hands were pushing up Rodney’s shirt so that they could
stake claim, blaze pioneering trails of warmth and possession over the skin
of his abdomen and chest and back, and Rodney—possibly for the first time
in years—stopped thinking. Instead, he occupied his brain with instructing
his own hands to reciprocate, and opened himself up to the scent and the
sounds and the feel of John.
Their clothes disappeared in a blur of hands and the occasional jab
from an elbow, but Rodney didn’t complain when John caught him in the stomach
as he yanked his rebellious shirt off and threw it aside. Rodney
looked up and saw John’s dog tags hanging innocuously over his sternum,
nestled against the pale skin and dark, silky hair. He was abruptly
reminded of the time he saw them right before Ford stopped John’s heart,
and the next thing he knew he was standing there like a goof with one hand
spread over John’s left pectoral muscle.
But John didn’t look at him like he was a goof, only covered Rodney’s
hand with his own and placed his mouth over Rodney’s. Rodney groaned
and used his other hand to begin fumbling with John’s belt.
They didn’t talk at all, which was unusual for Rodney, who in the few
times he’d managed to take another human being to bed tended to sabotage
himself with and endless low-level barrage of thankful prayers to gods he
didn’t believe in and constant, concerned questions as to the adequacy of
his performance. This time, however, there was no need for either,
because John was no divinity on a pedestal, but real flesh and blood and
too-fragile bone, and Rodney knew how to touch him, knew how
to please him, though he couldn’t have even guessed where the knowledge was
coming from.
But the knowledge was there, and Rodney had the proof every time John
moaned or sighed or hissed a pleasure-pain burst of air between his teeth,
felt the evidence of John’s arousal as he watched his fingers curl around
the heat of it, saw the truth of it in John’s startled and nakedly pleading
eyes. Rodney kissed him with shocking lewdness, driving his tongue
into the depths of John’s mouth over and over, trailing his mouth wetly
over John’s sweaty skin, biting the tendons in his neck, the vulnerable skin
of his inner elbow. John thrashed and sighed and rolled him over and
straddled him, a grinning invitation to sin lit from below, and Rodney knew
that if he ended up as a Wraith after-dinner mint on the next mission he
couldn’t say he hadn’t lived life to the fullest after this.
“See? This is how you do it,” John said, wiggling his ass against Rodney’s
very interested lap. “Pin the hips so they can’t throw you.”
“I’ll remember that,” Rodney panted, and John moved his hips again
and Rodney began pleading brokenly, because you could lead an old horse
to new tricks but, oh, fuck it—
“God,” John murmured, “I think I want, I want to—”
“Yeah, okay,” Rodney breathed, nodding furiously, and John leaned in
and laughed into his mouth.
“You know, huh?” He sobered then, pulled back and looked at Rodney,
his face so open it was a raw wound. “You know, don’t you?”
Rodney slid his hands over the curve of John’s ass and John touched
his forehead to Rodney’s and sucked in air like he was returning to life.
“I know,” Rodney said, meaning this, meaning everything. “I know.”
By the time John finished recording his message to Sumner’s maybe-family
it was late, and the corridors of Atlantis were strangely quiet, quieter
than they’d been in days. It was as though everyone was taking a
few minutes to replenish depleted supplies of resolve, to remember why
they were fighting to stay alive. They were probably thinking of loved
ones, looking over precious photographs or child’s drawings they’d brought
with them, rereading letters of their own for the hundredth or thousandth
time.
When John wanted to remind himself of the reason he was interested
in remaining alive, all he could do—no, all he needed to do—was
knock on the right door.
Rodney’s blue eyes were bleary and bloodshot, his expression sour until
he registered the identity of his visitor. “Hey,” he said, his voice
hushed and sleep-roughened, “are you all right?”
“Are you?” John shot back.
“Of course not.”
John only stared at Rodney’s upper lip, which was now marred by a dusting
of stubble.
“John.”
John raised his eyes. “Hm.”
“You’re staring at my mouth in a semi-public place.”
“Upper lip.”
“What?”
“I’m staring at your upper lip. I like it.”
Rodney scowled. “It’s crooked.”
“Why I like it,” John murmured, smiling a little crookedly himself.
“Oh. Well, I suppose that makes some kind of sense, because I
can spend whole minutes contemplating your ears.”
“I couldn’t, uh, I couldn’t,” John said suddenly, “I couldn’t save
them.”
“Come inside,” Rodney said, putting a warm hand on John’s arm.
“I mean,” John explained as the doors closed behind them, “We saved
some of them, a few, but not enough, not enough, they took them all,
Jesus Christ they didn’t leave anybody— and all I could do was
hide and watch—”
“John—”
“I don’t know if I can save anybody any more, Rodney, God, I don’t
know—” John clamped his mouth shut and pressed the heels of his hands
into his eyes, hard, because shit, he couldn’t afford to do this,
but something told him he couldn’t afford not to, either, so he might as
well get it over with now. He came back to himself slowly, realizing
first that Rodney had somehow gotten him to sit on the bed beside him,
and second that he was currently rubbing John’s back with a surprising gentleness.
“I don’t know either,” Rodney was saying, while his hand moved slowly,
“but you don’t have to carry it all. We’re here. I’m here.”
John took his hands away from his eyes and cocked his head. “Rodney
McKay, Professional Hero?”
Rodney bowed slightly. “At your service.”
John felt his smile return, felt the first glimmer of joy and opened
himself to it before it could die from asphyxiation. “So does that
make us the Dynamic Duo?”
“Only if I get to be Batman.”
John arched a brow. “Traumatic childhood incident?”
“My sister was always Batman because she was older. Besides annoying
the hell out of me, I think it adversely affected my psychosexual development.”
“Oh yeah?” John murmured, leaning closer and enjoying the way Rodney’s
eyes widened. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“No, it’s definitely messed with my head, because even though I’ve
seen you naked I still can’t tell whether that was a compliment or a crack—”
“Rodney,” John said, half annoyed, half pleading, and Rodney obligingly
stopped talking a split second before John’s mouth covered his.
“See,” Rodney said, between kisses, “I’ve always had this love-hate
relationship with the superhero type—”
“Which one is this?” John asked, pushing him onto his back and straddling
him.
Rodney’s gaze darted to John’s left shoulder. “Can I tell you
later?”
“No,” John answered, touching Rodney’s face with the tips of his fingers.
God, it was beyond bearing that it had taken him thirty-six years and
a trip to another galaxy to find this, but it also made a crazy kind of
sense. Because if ever there was a moment when John could believe
he deserved something good, it was this one. “Tell me now.
There is no later.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Fine. There might be no later. God, Rodney, you’re
making me—”
“Okay. Yeah. It is. The first one.”
John kissed him again, this time with a hint of a bite. “You’re
a born romantic, aren’t you?” Sitting back, he began pushing Rodney’s
t-shirt up.
Impatiently, Rodney yanked the shirt off and started on John’s jacket.
His hair was sticking up at odd angles and his brow was creased as he
fumbled with the fastenings in the low light. “If that’s what you
wanted, you picked the wrong person.”
John didn’t know what to say to that right away, so he focused on stripping
Rodney, which didn’t take long, then on stripping himself, which did,
even with four hands working on it. There was a clumsiness to this
time that hadn’t been there before, as though they were both thinking too
hard about what they were doing. When they were finally naked and
John had his fingers wrapped around Rodney’s solid cock, he realized that
the only way this would work was if they kept the thinking to a minimum.
So John reached for his jacket and found the condom and the small tube
he’d appropriated from the stores. He saw the exact moment Rodney
registered the meaning of those items, saw the shift of his eyes that meant
he’d started thinking again.
John held up the condom in one hand and waved it to get Rodney’s attention.
“You.” He shook the tube at him. “Me.”
Rodney’s eyes threatened to pop out of his head. “But—”
John leaned down swiftly and silenced him with a kiss, then took him
by the shoulders and rolled them so that Rodney was on top of him.
God, the weight and the warmth of him felt good, felt real.
“Rodney,” he said, not allowing himself to think about the words before
they came out, “I couldn’t have picked anyone else. I didn’t have
a chance. You’re the most conceited human being in two galaxies,
and you snore like a freight train, and you’re braver than you have any
right to be and you’re the reason I still want to be in one piece when
all this shit is over. So okay. Yeah. It is for me, too.”
Rodney stared down at him for a long time, and John didn’t realize
he’d been holding his breath until Rodney nodded once and John felt his
lungs expand. “Okay,” Rodney said. “Uh, have you ever—”
He trailed off, helpless, and John decided to rescue him.
“Not really. Though I might have practiced last week.”
“You prac—oh, God,” Rodney breathed, kissing John hungrily. His
cock was pushing into John’s belly and his stubble scratched John’s chin
and John needed this more than he’d needed anything in a hell of a long
time. He refused to think about the implications of that fact, choosing
to focus instead on the endearing mixture of lust, terror and joy in Rodney’s
eyes as he set himself the task of readying John’s body. Granted, it
wasn’t as grand and noble a task as saving Atlantis, but John certainly appreciated
the effort, and told him so in the answering touch of his hands and mouth
and tongue. When John took the condom and rolled it slowly over Rodney’s
cock, the terror melted away and Rodney gasped and groaned and shuddered
and stared at John like he was the definition of division by zero.
That same instinct they’d developed on missions saved them the awkwardness
of finding a way to fit together, because as though sensing John’s restlessness,
Rodney moved off him, giving him freedom to move. Without conscious
thought, John turned away and rose up on his knees, legs spread and hands
braced against the wall. He heard Rodney make a small, breathless
noise behind him, and then felt the warmth of Rodney’s hands on his hips
and the hardness of Rodney’s knees against the insides of his thighs.
Reaching back, he used that same instinct to guide Rodney’s cock as he
sat back and took it inside.
When he was all the way down he registered the tickle of Rodney’s breath
and the press of his forehead against John’s shoulder blade, the trembling
of Rodney’s thigh muscles as they supported John’s weight. John
pushed up, feeling Rodney’s cock leave him a little, and Rodney let out
a sharp gust of air as though he’d been punched.
“Oh—oh God, that’s—” Rodney canted his hips, pushing in to the hilt
again, and John groaned at the slight change in angle. He slid back,
forcing Rodney down, then repeated the motion until Rodney caught on and
was rolling shallowly under him like a gentle but powerful ocean swell,
rising and retreating in a hypnotic rhythm.
When John allowed himself to think, he reasoned that eventually they’d
have to change position so that Rodney could really fuck him, because
this was a pleasant beginning, but the only way to end it was hard and
fast. And then Rodney pulled him back a little too far and John
flung an arm back to steady himself and hooked it around Rodney’s neck.
Rodney sighed out his name and licked the rim of his ear and braced his
arm across John’s chest and suddenly John was coming as his hips described
tiny, perfect circles, as Rodney moved under him and inside him like the
implacable sea.
“John.”
“Hmmph.”
“John, I can’t feel my arm.”
John groaned but obeyed the directive of the gentle shove, rolling
onto his side. He was rewarded by a warm body fitting itself to his
back and a tentative hand settling on his hip.
“I have a question about what you said earlier,” Rodney said just as
John was drifting off again.
“What part of ‘I practiced’ didn’t you get?”
“No, no, I got that, and by the way, I thank you for possibly the best
fantasy image ever, but—”
John sighed. “You were talking about something else.”
“Frankly, yes. Define ‘freight train’ for me. What are
we talking about in terms of decibel level?”
John smiled. “You ever been sitting at ground zero when they
drop an H-bomb?”
“Oh, give me a break.”
“Okay, just an A-bomb. Nothing huge. Say about fifty-kiloton
range.”
“John.”
“Hm.”
“Go to sleep.”
“Works for me,” John murmured, feeling Rodney’s arm tighten around
his chest briefly before going limp, hand falling naturally over his heart.
End
June, 2005
Like
the title image? See the extremely cool wallpapers made for me by
etui here!
leave
a comment on my livejournal
Back to Stargate:
Atlantis fiction