never knew me a better time
Gah, I am leaving for L.A. to watch the Giants kick the Dodgers around in like twenty minutes and so this is a rush job, please forgive all trespasses.
McKay/Sheppard, 24190 words, NC-17
Gravel Road
By Candle Beck
Tuesday, or what passes for one in this galaxy, and Sheppard gets shoved into the cell and stumbles, goes immediately to his knees.
McKay is horrified in both general and specific ways. There's blood all over Sheppard's face, his eyes rolling white and his battered mouth hanging open, gasping. Behind him, the Eridani soldiers swing the heavy wood door shut, scraping sound of the bolt as it shoots into place.
"Jesus Christ!" McKay shouts. Sheppard's head tips drunkenly in his direction, and McKay is appalled to see a messy agonized grin stretch across his face, like someone's got fishhooks in the corners of his mouth.
"I feel terrible," Sheppard reports, and then pitches forward.
McKay, quick as a cat, catches Sheppard before he can face-plant onto the filthy stones. Sheppard groans, bony trembling shoulders in McKay's hands, his blood-sticky head lolling against McKay's arm. Careful, McKay lays him out on the floor, fingers wrapped around the back of Sheppard's neck.
"What, what did they do to you?" McKay asks, though he doesn't really want to hear it.
Sheppard's eyelashes flutter. "Differn't things," he slurs.
"Is it anything, anything serious? Internal bleeding, I don't know. Are you okay?"
"Sure," Sheppard says, and the stupid bastard actually smiles again, red-toothed.
"Idiot," McKay says, weirdly breathless. The urge to palm across Sheppard's face and throat is near overwhelming. "Once they take your gun, you stop mouthing off, how difficult a concept is that to grasp? What did you expect? Did they strike you as the type to be impressed by that flippant jackassery you do so well? Because--and let me note that I find it astonishing the past several years of your life haven't yet drilled this into your thick skull--that type does not exist, not anywhere, and you can trust me on this because I've been to two galaxies."
"Hey, me too," Sheppard says, clearly learning nothing.
"What were you thinking?"
A twitch like Sheppard's trying to shrug, his head rolling to the side. "Wanted to get a look around."
McKay only barely registers that, occupied with the blood still swelling from Sheppard's split eyebrow. It rolls down the side of his face, falls off his ear to patter soundlessly on the dirty stone floor, and seeing the blood drip off Sheppard like that makes McKay sick to his stomach, as bad as if one of them were missing a limb.
"Shut up. You bleed worse the more you talk."
Sheppard makes a groaning wheezy sound that panics McKay for a second before he identifies it as a laugh. Sheppard never reacts like he's supposed to; it's more infuriating than anything else.
"Shut up," McKay says sharply, and then pulls off his shirt and balls it up to press to the wound in Sheppard's head. It leaves McKay in just a thin T-shirt, and immediately he's shivering, that damp underground chill. He grits his teeth against it, eyes locked on the blood soaking darkly into the fabric.
"Long day," Sheppard confides, half his face hidden, and his voice sounds beaten up too, as if it's been dragged behind a truck.
McKay touches the fingers of his free hand briefly to Sheppard's forehead, this one irregular patch of skin that seems unharmed. Feels hotter than usual, all the blood gathering for bruises. "It won't be much longer. Teyla and Ronon are coming, and, and your dumbass Marines."
"Don' talk shit 'bout the Marines," and Sheppard is fading fast, eyes swelling closed, wrecked mouth all askew.
"Sheppard." McKay's hands hover over him, fearful of landing. "Try to stay awake."
Sheppard's face shudders, looks like the heat shimmer on asphalt. He breathes out, "Sorry," before losing his grip on consciousness, his body going abruptly slack on the dirty cell floor.
It's a bad moment for McKay, feels like watching lava swallow the planet's only working stargate, like being stranded and abandoned, something similarly rife with dread. He'd rather have Sheppard mumbling and bloody and half-incoherent instead of dead weight, any goddamn day of the week.
But this is a so-called Tuesday in the Pegasus Galaxy, where wishes do not apply. Sheppard stays unconscious all through the daring rescue and frenzied escape, slung limp over one of Ronon's shoulders as they dash for the gate. McKay is just behind, perfect angle to see the lank hang Sheppard's arms, his loose-fingered hands bumping weightlessly against Ronon's legs. It would look exactly the same if Sheppard were dead.
Not for the first time, it occurs to McKay that becoming friends with John Sheppard might not have been the smartest decision he's ever made.
*
All right, but it's not as if he had much choice in the matter.
McKay's first impression of Sheppard is mixed up with more reasonably awe-inspiring things. It's woven intractably with seeing the chair glow like Christmas for the first time, the raindrops-on-cobwebs shape of the solar system floating so delicate and precise over their heads. That picture branded into McKay's brain, complete in every detail, and Sheppard was just an unknown entity all skinny shoulders and idiotic hair, rich light pouring out around him and he wasn't even trying. It was a pretty fantastic entrance, McKay can admit.
And then they went to Atlantis. And Atlantis opened up to Sheppard like a flower to the goddamn sun.
The convolutions got worse in McKay's head. He spent too much time in those first few weeks exploring the city with Sheppard and getting shoved off balconies by him and joy-riding around their new still-blue planet because Sheppard couldn't get over the puddlejumpers. Sheppard's wondrous dim-looking face was an ideal reflection of whatever was happening inside McKay, the various foundational transfigurations to which he was having trouble putting words. As a guiding principle in life, McKay did not like things that he couldn't put words to, but nothing worked as it was supposed to on this side of the universe, because he did like Sheppard. Right from the start, and despite some very persuasive efforts to the contrary, it was frankly disturbing how much McKay liked Sheppard.
But what are you gonna do? Sheppard was designed to be liked, McKay sometimes thinks. Just fewer than three hundred people live in their city, and John Sheppard is the favorite of a good quarter of them, easy. Something about his tendency to lean, probably, and the hair and the smirk and his half-lidded almost-green eyes, all the usual suspects. Self-destructive tendencies disguised as bravery. Doubt buried in nonchalance. Charm on Sheppard's surface like oil glossing a mirror, near smiles and narrow hands, watchful eyes. Most of it is a put-on, McKay figures. If Sheppard's a mirror, he only ever shows what other people are expecting to see.
It's a blow to McKay's ego, being just one of a crowd, but here he is, maddening right along with everyone else. When he thinks Atlantis loves him, he doesn't just mean the metal and glass parts. John Sheppard is the hero of this show, and the rest of them are just around to be rescued or sacrificed, depending.
More than a little annoying, and it should bother McKay much more than it does, but, well. The flip side of the coin, the totally unexpected part of the whole thing, is that Sheppard really seems to like him an awful lot, too.
Numbers can be applied to anything (anything), and McKay is tremendous at basic observation, always has been. He keeps his notes encrypted on a single sheet of graph paper buried in the tornado of his lowest desk drawer. Sheppard comes by McKay's lab with coffee or candy 2.8 times a week; they eat lunch together 5.3. They share quarters off-world 6.9 days a month (this after throwing out the six weeks the team spent penned up in the single Wraith-secure room the people of MR5-238 were able to offer them while McKay fixed their gate, as it was the outlying East German judge of the data). Seven of the socks in McKay's drawer don't belong to him (socks, how in the world did he manage to acquire the man's socks?). McKay can read four distinct emotions on Sheppard's face, maybe not so impressive until one remembers that this is John Sheppard we're talking about here. When McKay gets to a meeting first, Sheppard always takes the seat next to him. When Sheppard gets there first, there's always an empty seat beside him waiting for McKay. They arrive together 68.4% of the time, anyway. Every time Sheppard makes one of his quippy little asides, he glances at McKay for a reaction--every single time.
It's taken a while, and a staggering amount of peril and inconvenience, but at this point McKay is about ninety percent sure that he's John Sheppard's best friend in the entire galaxy, and who the hell saw that one coming?
McKay thinks that if he had had a standard lonely-genius childhood, abused by and starved for affection from his peers, he might have once wished for such an inarguably cool best friend with whom to zip around exploring an alien galaxy, but he was never a lonely-genius so much as a genius-evenmoregenius, unfettered by such plebeian concerns as sociality, and mostly he'd just wished for the alien galaxy. It had seemed more plausible, anyway.
Turns out Rodney gets both--such is the world they've found.
Having a best friend is claustrophobic and irritating in its broad strokes--Sheppard barefoot in the hallway with another terrible action movie when McKay has work to do, Sheppard teasing him like McKay doesn't already know he slept on his hair funny (and as if Sheppard can talk), Sheppard swiping Athosian fries off his plate without even asking first, Sheppard's quick mouth curling lovingly around the name 'Meredith'--but the finer points are largely agreeable.
For instance: there's always someone around for McKay to roll his eyes at when the atmosphere of stupidity reaches a fever pitch, which is invariably. He's never realized how critical that could be, just having someone around to roll his eyes at, like regularly suffering life-threatening incompetence might be worth it to see Sheppard twitch his eyebrows and smirk back at him.
Little things. Details and trivia. The randomness of peanut butter cookies wrapped up in coarse brown napkins and poking out of Sheppard's pocket as he slouches against a desk in McKay's lab, waiting for him to get done so they can go look for Sam the almost-whale again. Johnny Cash songs get stuck in McKay's head for days on end, darkish sad stuff about trains and prisons. The information on Sheppard's dog-tags, which McKay was obliged to memorize during the endless night they spent trapped in a pit on P3Y-892, Sheppard drugged and sweating and delirious when he wasn't unconscious, his skin pale as wax and sticky to the touch, and McKay remembers pulling the chain out of Sheppard's shirt, the tags swinging back to clip Sheppard's chin and McKay breathing out thoughtlessly, "Sorry, sorry." He remembers with pinpoint clarity the feel of each tiny punched-out letter against the tip of his thumb.
Strange, of course it's strange. Whole new world, and not just literally this time. McKay isn't accustomed to sifting through the specifics and vagaries that define the lives of others. He isn't accustomed to caring about other people to the extent that the specifics and vagaries become relevant.
But then, context. Five months ago McKay got turned into sentient goo for a week. Nothing much surprises him anymore.
*
Sheppard talks his way out of the infirmary a day early, and shows up for lunch in the mess hall, muddy with bruises and swollen-lipped.
McKay glares at him. "Funny, I've just lost my appetite."
"Well, then," and Sheppard makes a grab for McKay's pudding cup, and only a ninja-fork move keeps it safe.
"No pudding for you. You look like you went ten rounds with Mike Tyson."
"A famed Earth warrior," Teyla explains sotto voce for Ronon's benefit, and McKay coughs into his fist, grudgingly amused because that's roughly accurate.
Sheppard has affixed a baleful pout, considerably more effective with the damage done making him look so pathetic anyway. McKay shifts in his chair, scowling at his tray. He's not going to be manipulated just because someone who's made his career as a professional soldier can't keep from getting his ass kicked for so much as a week at a time. Puppy dog eyes, puppy dog shiners even, are no compensation for the fundamental lack of common sense embodied by everything Sheppard is and does.
McKay has a pretty good head of steam built up about the whole thing. Meanwhile, Teyla smiles at Sheppard and says, "It is good to see you somewhere other than the infirmary, John."
Sheppard ducks his head, bashful slant calculated onto of his smile. "Yeah, it's good to be back."
"Gonna have a new scar," Ronon says, leaning forward to peer at the crooked half-moon of black stitches holding Sheppard's right eyebrow together. "Live another year."
"What?" McKay asks sharply. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Ronon chomps on a purple Denordish apple-thing, says with his mouth full because evidently in Pegasus table manners are a subjective matter, "Old saying on Sateda. Every scar earned in battle means another year added to the end of your life."
"What?" McKay glares across the table at Ronon, personally affronted by such illogic. "How exactly does that work? Every injury serious enough to leave a scar somehow improves your longevity? And no one questioned that on grounds of it being ridiculous?"
"Always so literal, Rodney," Sheppard says, lazy and reproving. "It's just an expression."
"My people have a similar saying," Teyla says as she uses a spoon to corral Chirigon kinda-walnuts off her plate and onto Ronon's. "The more marks of war a woman wears, the stronger the children she will bear."
"That makes even less sense," McKay says with conviction. Teyla lifts one elegant shoulder, unperturbed, and nudges Ronon's plate back to him.
Sheppard is carefully eating soup, tipping the spoon around his fat lip. His face is a dozen different colors, lavender and indigo and jaundice yellow. He sits unnaturally straight, shoulders tense and hovering--cracked ribs, McKay knows. Sheppard's breath is shallow but not audibly labored. He has always had a ridiculously high tolerance for pain.
"I mean, I can understand glorifying military service as such," McKay continues doggedly. "The defense of the homeland, preservation of a people, etcetera etcetera, although that's really more of an excuse for Ronon and Teyla." He stabs his fork in Sheppard's direction. "Your country hasn't been invaded in almost two hundred years-"
"Says the Canadian," Sheppard jeers.
"Excuse me, the Fenian raids!" McKay knew all those hours spent watching that Canadian Jeopardy! knockoff on the community channel would pay off one of these days. "You can take your War of 1812 and shove it."
"The . . . Fenian raids?" The eye that's not swollen shut is wide, familiar disbelief writ all over Sheppard's face. "You're seriously arguing that the Fenian raids count as an invasion of Canada?"
Briefly distracted, wondering immediately and fiercely how the hell do you know about the Fenian raids, and then McKay waves his fork around, dismissing the tangent.
"Not the point, not the point. What I was saying, if we could stay on topic for once, is that romanticizing military service seems reasonable enough to me, but why romanticize the actual physical damage? The, the scars, the mutilations, that's the bad part, the negative outcome. Why do people always want to hold it up and cheer?"
It's momentarily quiet, although McKay doesn't think for a second that he's stunned them to silence with his brilliance (most people, he's found, are too obtuse to properly appreciate the full scope of said brilliance). Teyla is smiling slightly and drinking her tea, watching them like it's a free show. Ronon looks faintly bored, slumped back in his seat with a stogie of semi-celery sticking out of the side of his mouth.
For his part, Sheppard shows only a cynical smile, dangerous and pained on his battered mouth. "No Purple Hearts in Rodney McKay's army, huh?"
"Right," McKay agrees, feeling sorta weird and shaky, his arguments wavering. "Maybe there'll be a medal for coming home unscathed, instead."
Sheppard snorts and shakes his head, looking away. McKay stares at him. There's one stray bruise on the side of Sheppard's neck, just above the collar of his shirt. It's shaped sort of like China, and McKay thinks that his thumb would cover it up entirely, odd sideways kind of thought.
"Not getting hurt means you weren't trying hard enough," Ronon says with his standard implacable surety.
McKay tightens his jaw. "That kind of talk is exactly what I'm talking about. Every meathead in this city buys into that drivel."
"Meathead?" Teyla inquires softly, and Sheppard shoves his tray so that it clatters loudly against McKay's, making him jump.
"He means me," Sheppard says. "The rest of the military contingent too, but mainly me, right Rodney?"
Sheppard's face looks funny. Lopsided bruises, cyclops eye, obscene puff of his mouth, that dark split in his lower lip, but it's not the physical, not just the things McKay can readily catalog. Sheppard seems like he might be pretty pissed off, and McKay feels a little sick, but puts that aside, goes immediately on the offensive.
"You're a handy example of the breed, Colonel, yes. Forgive me if your latest display of masochistic tactical ineptitude happens to be rather fresh in my mind."
Sheppard attempts a sneer, but twisting his mouth visibly hurts him, and he settles for kicking McKay's ankle under the table, which is dirty pool.
"One of us had to get out of that cell and get a lay of the place," Sheppard says, clipped. "I know you woulda been happy just sitting around waiting to get rescued-"
"We did get rescued!" McKay says, just a bit louder than he intended, and from the left someone (sounds like Zelenka, that rat) actually shushes him, as if that's going to do any good. "We always get rescued! Teyla beat the shit out of a bunch of guys, Ronon kicked down three doors--of course you wouldn't remember any of that, having been unconscious at the time. Just so you know, your head doesn't actually get harder the more times you get knocked out, I don't care what they told you in Pop Warner."
"I never played Pop Warner," Sheppard says, and for some reason he sounds absolutely furious, and that stuns McKay, stuns Teyla and Ronon too, widening their eyes and stilling their hands. Sheppard looks a bit taken aback himself, and kinda surly and beat-up and oldish, tired. He curls his hands (discolored knuckles, scabs and fixed dislocations, because god forbid Sheppard stop putting up a fight even if it's ten to one against) around the edge of the table, and doesn't say anything else, doesn't look up.
McKay opens his mouth, no idea what he intends to say (something petty and awful and unforgivable, no doubt), but luckily Ronon speaks up before he can.
"What's Pop Warner, like a head-smashing game? Can we play that instead of golf?"
Sheppard's head comes up, and he blinks at Ronon for a second before starting to laugh, idiot, agony hunching his shoulders and screwing up his face even as guffaws chortle out of him. Ronon glares good-naturedly, arms crossed over his chest. Sheppard's breathing gets wheezy and strained, the split in his lower lip re-opening with his grin, thin line of bright red blood, and when McKay says, "Oh for god's sake," his voice cracks, but no one seems to notice.
The conversation turns to kinder things once Sheppard has calmed himself and surreptitiously palmed the tears of pain away from his eyes. McKay watches Sheppard affect his cover again, the ease of the smirk he shows Ronon, the boyish smile he saves for Teyla. There's blurring at Sheppard's edges, this sense of the picture skipping. McKay isn't sure which of them to blame for that.
Sheppard deploys the silent treatment against McKay for the rest of lunch, which is no more than McKay expected, Sheppard having wide swaths of teenage girl running through his flyboy soul. It's still incredibly obnoxious, a blank stone wall where McKay left his best audience, abruptly robbed of the only person who can be relied upon to laugh at his jokes.
McKay leaves before the rest of them, making up some excuse. He hides out in his lab for the rest of the day, where he is importuned and harried and underappreciated and misunderstood. So, nothing new.
*
Things are tense and awkward for a while.
Sheppard isn't allowed to do much until his ribs heal, no running or sparring or even flying the jumpers, because flying is something of a full-body activity for Sheppard, and he doesn't know how to turn that off. Under normal circumstances, such enforced inertia would send Sheppard directly to McKay's lab, where he would drape himself across things and whistle off-key and derail McKay's train of thought every five minutes with inanities. Pestering McKay is Sheppard's all-around Plan B.
Not this time, though. Sheppard spends his days with the Marines, leaning against the wall shouting instruction as he watches them go through their drills, trailing the security teams through the ghostly uninhabited sections of the city. McKay catches glimpses of him, spiky hair in the midst of crew cuts in the mess, Sheppard's barking laugh echoing down hallways, around corners.
A bad mood develops in McKay, black clouds. No point being subtle about it. He snaps at Miko and ridicules Zelenka and takes off the brakes as far as Kavanaugh is concerned, whole new compendia of vicious insult opening themselves up to him. Everybody starts to give him a wide berth, a forcefield, and that's good, as it should be. McKay has a headache that won't go away and the coffee keeps running out by three in the afternoon and he's millions of lightyears away from anything but cruddy American chocolate, and nobody ever understands how legitimately pissed-off he is; they just write it off, making excuses he never asked for: you know that temper of his, he's been working a lot recently, oh Rodney didn't really mean that.
One of these days McKay is going to take a golf club to his workstation, and then they'll see. Favored daydream, it exists so cleanly in his mind, shattered glass and exploded computers and shocked white-eyed faces circling all around.
It's not because of Sheppard, or the lack thereof. Correlation, not causality, and it'd be a rookie mistake of the basest kind to confuse the two.
In the jumper bay, three minutes after Sheppard walked in (face half-healed, greenish-yellow and two-eyed again), spotted McKay, turned on his heel and left, McKay says to Teyla without thinking:
"No, no, it tightens to the right, that's not even something you need an education to know, c'mon."
He's not looking at Teyla's face, focused on the warped piece of paneling they're working on, and so he startles badly when she slams her wrench down on the floor of the jumper, huge metal clang.
McKay shouts, "What!" and almost falls over before catching himself and sitting back on his heels. Teyla is glaring at him, her mouth a straight line and her eyes hard, and McKay gets a sinking feeling in his stomach.
"Do you believe that I am of less value to the team because I did not benefit from the same manner of education as you and Colonel Sheppard?" Teyla asks in a dangerously low voice.
"Oh my god, no, of course not!" McKay's hands fly, mortification churning his gut. "That was really, really not what I meant, I promise you. You're about ten times more valuable to the team than I am, everybody knows that. I was. I was just. I'm sorry?"
Didn't really mean for that to come out as a question, but the steely set of Teyla's face relaxes somewhat, slipping from immediate offense to more general disappointment, which is possibly worse.
"As someone who claims great intelligence, you should consider your words more carefully before you say them," she tells him, cold and not friends yet.
McKay nods emphatically. "I should, I really absolutely should and will. Thank you. Ah. I'm sorry, again. I don't think you're--anything. I, I think you're very smart."
He goes to pat her on the shoulder but aborts at the last minute, huffing and scrubbing his palm on his pants, badly off-kilter and that gets the slightest break from Teyla, her lips twitching.
"Thank you, Rodney," she says seriously. McKay swallows and blusters and waves it off.
All this interpersonal stuff, it's going to be the death of him, he just knows it. McKay picks up the wrench and hands it back to Teyla, wanting to get back to concrete things.
Teyla sets back to work on the panel, slim forearms flexing dusky gold in the dim light, and tells him, "You have not seemed yourself, recently."
"Yes, well." McKay clears his throat, shifts on his sore knees. "Can't be sunshine and roses all the time, can we?"
"John is very upset with you."
McKay is good, hardly reacts. Cold snap in his stomach, muscles going taut in his neck and shoulders, but you'd have to be looking really close to see it.
"I am aware of that," he says.
"How will you repair it?"
"I'm sorry, this whole thing is suddenly my fault?" McKay yanks at the busted panel, trying to jigger it into place. He's not looking at Teyla. "That's incredibly unfair. He's the one who keeps almost dying on us."
"He never risks himself without the protection of the city or one of us foremost in his mind," Teyla says. "You cannot fault him his loyalty."
"Watch me," McKay snaps, sick and tired of this conversation.
"That is beneath you, Rodney," and Teyla sounds like she expected so much better from him, his mom and sister and every girlfriend all rolled into one. It kills McKay a little bit.
"What am I supposed to do?" McKay demands, maybe only about twenty percent sure that he still occupies the high ground, forging ahead because he's unsure where else to go. "He gets enough praise and encouragement for his suicide attempts from the rest of you people. One of these days that goddamn loyalty is going to get him killed and then Atlantis will have its martyr and you'll all be happy."
Teyla doesn't hit him in the face with the wrench, but it seems like a very near thing. She gives him a look of such scathing contempt that goosebumps break out on McKay's arms, and then gets to her feet. McKay stares up at her, helplessly aware that he took flight from rationality at some point along the way there, his mouth running on as his mind shrinks back in horror. He has an awful habit of ruining things just like that.
"You are not worth my company today," Teyla tells him with the ring of plain truth, and leaves him kneeling alone on the floor of the jumper. She takes the wrench with her and everything.
McKay shifts, sitting with his back to the wall and his hands hung over his knees. He tips his head back, feeling lousy in about six different ways and wanting a do-over on the whole week. He wonders how long it will take someone to come looking for him if he just stays here, and figures that once you take Sheppard out of the equation, it might be weeks.
*
Another several days pass, improving nothing.
With the team still grounded and half of them pissed off at him anyway, McKay basically moves into his lab, commandeering a skinny rack cot from the entomologists (strange mole-like people who haven't seen the sun in months, dry hands and watery pinkish eyes) and hoarding MREs in a container marked for hazardous waste. The cot is mostly for appearances, because he's not really sleeping much. Long hours lit only by chilled blue computer light, shaky hands and sore eyes and all, and McKay might be a twenty year old doctoral student again, living tenuously by the grace of vending machines and instant coffee. It's all terribly nostalgic.
Zelenka tolerates this for three days, not bothering to hide his increasingly judgmental expressions, and on the fourth morning, lures McKay to the mess with a rumor of fresh donuts (a traitorous lie), and then locks him out of the lab.
Crackling over the radio, Zelenka tells him, "At least you must shower."
"Who put you in charge!" McKay hasn't been reduced to kicking the door, but give him another five minutes. "This is an egregious misuse of whatever piddling authority you might have been deluded into thinking you possess, and don't think there won't be consequences."
Zelenka's sigh rattles in McKay's ear. "Yes, yes, I am very afraid of you. Please get some sleep. And shower."
A gaggle of Marines goes by, glancing at McKay stranded in the hallway and trading smirks with each other, and what the hell, does the U.S. military train their people to wear that brainless expression, to what possible purpose?
He isn't going to stand here and be publicly ridiculed by colleagues and troglodytes alike. McKay hollers some of the Czech profanity that Zelenka has taught him over the years, and storms off in an impressive fashion that no one is around to see.
Feeling contrary and embittered, McKay doesn't go back to his room, instead taking a transporter to the western edge of the city, where defunct piers stretch gray arms out into the water.
Quiet and windy out there, the ocean going on and on. The spires and towers of Atlantis cast shadows on the piers, light and dark as McKay walks. This planet is approximately four-fifths the size of Earth, just different enough to noticeably steepen the curve of the horizon.
McKay calms down. Smells like salt and metal out here, electricity and dark matter. He begins to construct his revenge on Zelenka, which will be far-reaching and merciless and possibly involve box turtles (Zelenka's secret fear, foolishly revealed during the harvest festival on M4R-830 with the alien homebrew that later tested at 140-proof).
A whining growl is McKay's only warning before a red and silver RC car goes zipping between his feet. He maintains his balance only through great effort, and whirls to find Sheppard not ten feet away with the controller in his hands, hip cocked out. McKay rages inwardly. There's no justice in the universe.
"What are you doing?" McKay asks, not too accusatory to his own ears but Sheppard's eyebrows still tighten.
"Killing time." Sheppard's face is pretty much healed, his mouth a regular shape again. He's back to slouching even as he stands, so his ribs must be better too.
The RC car (the flames on the sides hand-painted by Sheppard seated cross-legged on the floor of his room while McKay was at the desk, installing miniature rocket boosters on his own car) whirrs behind McKay, weaves between the two of them. Sheppard's thumbs twitch almost imperceptibly on the controls, his eyes following the car.
"The traction on the new wheels is awesome," Sheppard says distractedly.
McKay is staring at him, finding it difficult to stop. "Yes, well, as expected."
There should be more there, but McKay's mind goes blank. Not blank, precisely, but blurred, overexposed, like the sun is shining in his eyes though it's not, it's behind the city. He looks at Sheppard's slim wrists and then up to the sloping line of his shoulders, and McKay's mouth is dry, his eyes hot, not at all certain what's going on right now.
"You're not making too many friends right now," Sheppard tells him with unbearable nonchalance.
McKay clenches his hands into fists. "Oh well, stop the presses."
Little smirk tipping Sheppard's restored mouth, making something turn over in McKay's stomach. "Even worse than usual, is what I hear."
"From whom?"
Sheppard shrugs. "Sources."
McKay scoffs. "Ah yes, unnamed sources, how very trustworthy they are."
"Unnamed to you," Sheppard says with a mean grin.
The RC car revs mockingly at McKay's feet, and he thinks about kicking it into the ocean, but then he wouldn't be able to steal the wheels off it later.
"If Zelenka is fomenting rebellion, he might at least have the balls to do it to my face," McKay says, scowling.
"That seems like a less than effective way to foment rebellion," Sheppard points out, and McKay hates that, so goddamn clever all the time.
"What do you care, anyway?" McKay mutters.
"I care." Sheppard sounds wounded, but that's not real. The wind has shoved his hair to the side, steep soft-looking angles.
"Right," McKay snorts. "I'm sure worrying about my social standing is keeping you up nights. You being Captain Popular of Atlantis Junior High, and all."
"So hostile," delivered with another one of those heartless smirks, and what Sheppard needs is a good smack, McKay's hand itching at his side. "I'm only trying to help, you know."
"I don't know that."
"Jesus, McKay." A breath punches out of Sheppard, and he lets the controller fall, the car going silent. "What crawled up your ass?"
"Nothing, nothing, what," McKay says fast. "Just because some of the incompetents in my department like to whine, that doesn't mean-"
"Oh give me a break," and Sheppard is glaring at him, that awfully familiar why-the-hell-was-I-hanging-out-with-you look creeping into the edges of his expression. "This is all since Eridanus. You're pissed at me, and you're taking it out on everybody else."
"I can't be pissed at you and everybody else at the same time? That runs directly counter to years of experience, I gotta say."
"I don't even know what's got you so worked up," Sheppard says. "What, you just got the message that the job is a little dangerous?"
"It's not--you don't-" and there are few things McKay hates more in this world than incoherence, the words backing up in his throat, too thick to come out one by one. Sheppard affects him so easily, it's insane.
McKay huffs in a deep breath, looking past Sheppard to the high knife-like towers of their city. Sheppard waits him out, watching McKay in that way of his that might as well be audible.
"You're military," McKay says once he's got it in order in his head. "You know about acceptable risks."
"Uh, yeah," Sheppard answers in the dumb guy voice that McKay can't stand, but he's not going to get into that now.
"That's fine, whatever. Obviously there's a degree of peril to everything we do out here, obviously that's part of the appeal or else none of us would have stepped through in the first place. Acceptable risk. But then there's the stuff that you pull, which is different: it's pointless and unnecessary and potentially fatal, it's unacceptable. For example. Letting the Eridanis beat the shit out of you just so you could get out of the cell, get a look around? That's an unacceptable goddamn risk, Colonel, do you get that?"
It sounds pretty good coming out of his mouth, confident and well-reasoned and strident, and McKay thinks maybe he'll get away with this for once, but then he sneaks a glance at Sheppard's face and it's like quarantine protocols kicking in, every door in Atlantis shunting closed at once. McKay bites his tongue, tries to brace himself.
"Thanks, McKay," Sheppard says, but of course he doesn't mean that, he never means what he seems to. "It's great to hear how totally fucked you think my judgment is, that's really neat."
"That isn't what-" I was trying to say, but McKay swallows it back, suddenly not sure if it could be taken in any other way. It might have been exactly what he was trying to say, just sounds worse coming from Sheppard himself. "I mean. You, obviously you have your good moments as well."
Sheppard sneers, and the RC car growls in abrupt counterpoint, making McKay start because he'd forgotten about it and it sounds like a tiny man-eating creature when you're not expecting it.
"Fantastic. I get to die a horrible death from self-inflicted stupidity, but I also have my good moments! I'm all cheered up now." Sheppard bites off a huge joyless smile.
McKay throws up his hands, his throat tight. "I don't even know why I bother talking to you."
"Yeah, search the fuck out of me," and Sheppard is turning away, jerking his head weirdly like he's spotted a bee or something. The RC car zips after him, a perfectly trained pet. Tossed over his shoulder like a flicked cigarette, Sheppard says, "Don't hurry back or anything, Rodney. Everybody's getting by just fine without you."
McKay turns towards the ocean rather than watch Sheppard go. He can feel his blood moving, overly hot and sluggish. He's aware that his face is burning, his heart pounding like Sheppard had actually taken a swing at him, and maybe that would have been better.
"After all, that last thing was pretty cruel," McKay says to the water, and the wind is bad enough that he can't even really hear it himself.
*
The next day, Ronon collars McKay outside the mess and drags him against his will to the gym.
Half an hour after that, McKay lies on his back on the sticky blue mat, panting up at the ceiling.
"Better," Ronon says, not even breathing hard.
McKay sucks in air through his open mouth and glares at him, one hand flat to his sternum where a bruise in the shape of Ronon's fist is even now shading into existence. His legs feel watery, all that ducking and rolling and bracing against Ronon's weight. There's a fabric burn on his elbow that tingles like hydrochloric acid.
"You should be running with me and Sheppard," Ronon says. "You breathe like an old woman."
No doubt McKay's comeback would have crippled him, but sadly he lacks the air to properly deliver it. He settles for making the obscene Satedan gesture that Ronon taught them years ago. Ronon grins sharkish, and fires the gesture's female equivalent right back at him.
McKay recovers slowly, thunder dying out in his ears, his skin rattling and flushing and cooling. Ronon brings him a bottle of water that's incentive enough to get McKay sitting upright, and Ronon hunkers down next to him, his dreads swinging and making McKay think of wind chimes.
"I'll have you know that I have excellent lung capacity," McKay tells him once he can without his breath hitching. "I took a spirometer test at McMurdo and ranked off the charts."
"I don't know what that is," Ronon says and then raises a hand to cut off McKay's explanation. "Wasn't asking."
"Yes, well. If you'd prefer to labor in ignorance, no skin off my nose." McKay sniffs, takes another long drink of water.
Ronon is giving him a well-worn look, you-Earthlings-say-the-strangest-things, but he grunts good-naturedly, gets to his feet and offers McKay a hand. McKay could do with another few minutes on the floor, but even in the Pegasus Galaxy machismo is a force to be reckoned with, and so he allows Ronon to haul him up.
"Are you coming to dinner tonight?" Ronon asks as they're putting their shoes back on.
McKay suffers a flash, sitting around a table with the team and Sheppard ignoring him just as cool and easy as everyone else who ever has; it's just McKay so who cares if you pretend he's not there?
"Ah, no, no, I think not," he answers, kinda fumbling with it. "I'm, I've been very much engaged with these, these energy simulations, an effort to redistribute the power flow in the city to establish more streamlined emergency protocols, it's really, it's quite important that I, I attend to it," and god knows McKay could have gone on in that vein for whole minutes longer, but Ronon's smirking at him, and it curls an uncomfortable fist in McKay's stomach, weird hinky expression that Ronon obviously learned from Sheppard, and for whatever inane reason that shuts McKay up.
Ronon quirks his eyebrows, makes a vague growl that's irritating in that it illuminates exactly nothing, and waits until they're in the hallway, about to go their separate ways, before asking, "Sheppard doesn't like you anymore, huh?"
McKay freezes, physically and internally and mentally, really in all ways. He stares down the hallway to the transporter, where two military personnel are leaning on the wall talking and sharing a Hershey's. Too far away to hear and he doesn't know why he cares anyway. The water bottle he's still holding crinkles in his grip.
"That. That is an extremely uninformed analysis of the situation," McKay says after a moment.
"Yeah?" Ronon says, sounding simultaneously bored and expectant.
"Yes. Yes. He doesn't--it isn't dislike, he's just mad at me." That sounds unaccountably self-defeating, so McKay adds, "And I'm mad at him, of course. It's a, a, a mutual kind of thing."
"Huh," Ronon says, managing to convey volumes of skepticism in it.
"It's true," McKay says weakly. His skin feels like it's trying to crawl away.
"You'd know better than me," Ronon says, suspiciously agreeable. McKay glares at him.
"I'm sure people occasionally got into fights with each other on Sateda. You can quit acting like this is some freaky Earth behavior the only purpose of which is to amuse you."
A faint grin flickers across Ronon's face. "Okay."
"You're really very annoying," McKay mutters, and heads for the transporter, gritting his teeth and nodding stiffly at the military guys. Ronon follows him in, and leans against the wall in a way that feels mildly accusatory.
"It'll blow over, anyway," McKay says to the glowing map, city all spread out under his hand.
"Hope so," Ronon answers. "Sheppard's no fun anymore either, all moody all the time."
McKay blinks, briefly shaken. "That probably doesn't have anything to do with me."
Ronon huffs a little laugh. "Stupid."
The impudence. McKay turns to give Ronon a vicious look. "I'm one of the smartest people you'll ever meet."
That's just plain fact, but it doesn't keep Ronon from shrugging and half-grinning and replying, "Still sound pretty stupid to me."
The transporter comes shuddering to a halt, saving McKay the trouble of responding, and he fires Ronon another glare before stalking away without bothering to say goodbye.
The rest of that day is no better. By the time McKay is choking down a Powerbar with one hand still on the keyboard, 3:27 in the morning and red-eyed and all alone, he has picked out half a dozen fatal flaws in the logic of friendship; he could write a goddamn thesis.
*
The first mission the team is sent on once Beckett greenlights Sheppard is a dangerless milkrun to T9X-829. They're going with aspirin and multivitamins and band-aids (somehow no one anticipated how valuable the simple genius of a band-aid would be in a galaxy where a majority of the people live in caves and mud-huts), to offer for trade at the big interplanetary market.
McKay furthers his ongoing campaign to win Teyla back onto his side by bringing her a package of powdered mini-donuts from his private stash (even in another galaxy, the person has yet to be found who can resist powdered mini-donuts). Ronon scowls murderously until McKay sacrifices one of his own donuts to the cause of group morale (and not getting his face smashed in), and they eat in the back of the jumper, licking their fingers like kids. Sheppard flies and sometimes when McKay looks up Sheppard is looking back over his shoulder at them, expression inscrutable.
The people on T9X-829 call themselves the Lejardan, and in addition to the market, they're in the middle of their bi-annual games when the team from Atlantis shows up. There are fields and pits and rings all writhing and a-grunt with women and men engaged in half-recognizable sports, field hockey combined with rugby, pseudo-judo heavily featuring elements of classical ballet, Greco-Roman wrestling hilariously infused into something that appears to be condensed capture-the-flag.
Teyla navigates the sprawling market like she was born to it, and soon enough they're seated on animal hides in the magistrate's tent, passing wooden plates of food back and forth.
The Lejardan magistrate is a pretty good guy, tall and stodgy with a gray raw-boned face and an always vaguely aggrieved air. It's clear that he adores Teyla like a daughter, which helps put everyone at ease.
"You are all welcome to participate in the games, of course," the magistrate tells them.
Ronon makes intrigued pre-verbal sounds, while McKay stuffs his mouth with bread (the odds of planets in Pegasus having naturally occurring yeast spores in the air work out to approximately 23.8% chance each time through the gate, so McKay's not inclined to take it for granted). The other Lejardan ministers get in on the act of describing the various athletic perils on offer, which McKay largely tunes out until Sheppard starts asking questions too.
"So, it's more points if you hit here?" and Sheppard chops slow-motion at the juncture of Ronon's neck and shoulder. "And here?" Another blow moving through molasses, digging into the center of Ronon's sternum, and a totally foreign feeling churns slowly in McKay as he watches Sheppard pretending again.
"The daclav," one of the ministers says with a nod, gesturing to his own neck, and then chest, "the rasleem."
"Cool," Sheppard says with an eager tone that scrapes the wrong way down McKay's spine.
"Surely you're not actually considering this?" McKay hears himself say, too loud. Everyone looks at him.
"I mean," McKay says, and then stops, blinking at the faces staring back at him, feeling his ears go hot. The Lejardans are polite and inquisitive, but there's dire warning all over Teyla's face. Sheppard, god only knows what's going on in Sheppard's head.
"It sounds great," McKay makes himself say, fashioning a painless look to go along with it. "The colonel is just. He's just recently recovered from an injury. That's all I meant to say."
Sheppard's mouth curls up almost exactly like a smile, his eyes hard. "Rodney's always looking out for me," he says, sweet as sugar, and McKay could throttle him sometimes.
Ronon enters the tournament, and they spend the rest of the afternoon watching him fight on swept-clean circles of dirt. He keeps knocking his opponents unconscious but still only squeaking by on points, flashing happy white-toothed snarls with his dreads whipping as he ducks and rolls and comes up elbow-first.
McKay wanders away after not too long of this. Violence is enough of a leit motif in his life that he doesn't need to spend his leisure time on it too. The games and market are as crowded as any single place he's been since coming to the Pegasus Galaxy, which is mostly due to Zelenka and Chaturvedi fixing the long-range sensors in this solar system six months ago, somewhat tempering the ever-present threat of gruesome death from above. Every shape and shade of person, tiny kids darting around like moths and guys laughing over blue liquor and traders bartering rapid-fire. Domesticated animals closer to llamas than horses baa petulantly in the background, crazy singing red chicken-things in wire cages serenading McKay as he goes past.
At the edge of the market is a rough line of trees, and McKay finds it easier to think the farther away he gets from the dimming rabble of humanity. Undergrowth crunches beneath him, thin bark flaking off like ash when he touches a tree trunk.
Eventually there's a break, a small open rise in the land with tall yellow grass for McKay to plop down in, digging a Powerbar out of his vest because he never stops being sorta hungry.
The sun is setting on the other side of the planet, and on this side there are two moons staggering into the sky, white half-coins gaining definition as it gets darker. McKay has been waiting approximately thirty-five years to get to a place where there are two moons, ever since he first saw the Earth's and wanted immediately to see another one.
It's peaceful and unhurried for all of five minutes, possibly a new record, and then Sheppard shows up.
He just appears, one crackling footstep and then his lanky dark form folding down next to McKay's in the grass. Sheppard's knees bend like jackknifes. A sigh rustles out of him as he settles in.
McKay is profoundly startled for about ten seconds, staring at Sheppard with a blown-open look on his face, and then he gets his wits about him.
"Colonel. Fancy meeting you here."
Sheppard tips his head, not really looking at McKay because there are two moons and all. "I honestly think a pack of wild boars might leave a more subtle trail to follow than you do."
"Well," and banter, easy ping-ponging banter that he never has to so much think about but where is it now, his mind jamming. "There, there wasn't any point in excessive stealth, was there? Having no reason to think anyone might want to follow me, after all."
"Teyla sent me after you."
"Oh." McKay is suspicious at once. He gives Sheppard a sidelong look, watching him methodically snap long stiff blades of grass into tiny pieces. "Why did she do that, do you think?"
One of Sheppard's shoulders hitches up. "I guess she was afraid you might accidentally start a war."
"Ha ha," McKay says with little to no humor. "Do you plan out these little bon mots ahead of time, or what?"
"That one wasn't even very good," Sheppard answers, and McKay flaps a hand at him, annoyed.
"Is Ronon going to win the Mudball Olympics?"
"Maybe not. They finally found some guys in his weight class."
McKay makes a dismissive sound. "There's being evenly matched physically, and then going up against someone with about fifteen years of professional soldiering and killing Wraith on his resume. I'm putting my money on our guy."
"I'll tell him that," Sheppard says with glancing smile that hits McKay's eyes like sunlight off car chrome, and other things that don't exist on this side of the universe.
A moment passes, the moons climbing the sky. Sheppard has his hands hanging off his knees, his face tipped upwards, and McKay finds himself looking at the line of Sheppard's throat, the ducking slide of his Adam's apple and the hollow under his jaw.
"Also," Sheppard says eventually. "I never intended to enter the damn tournament, I just wanted to know how it worked."
"Right, yes, whatever," McKay mutters, twisting his fist in the dirt on the side of his body that Sheppard can't see. "As if it would be so out of character for you."
"You gotta stop that overprotective stuff already," Sheppard says, and McKay jolts like he's been pricked, his eyes widening.
"It's not. Overprotective, that's a terrible word for it."
"Yeah? What would you call it?"
"Common sense, I would call it. I would call it a reasonable level of concern predicated on a pattern of excessive recklessness and traumatic near misses."
Worse things battle for space in McKay's mind. He could be so easily cruel, dig into those carefully concealed soft places on Sheppard, get him angry, get rid of him that way. McKay could be left alone again with the two moons and yellow grass, have some room to breathe.
McKay bites the inside of his lip instead. He doesn't want to fight with Sheppard right now.
"You act like it's something new," Sheppard says, sounding similarly cautious with his words, shaping each one. "We've been out here better than three years now, and I don't think I've gotten any worse at not getting myself killed. Why's it suddenly bothering you so much?"
McKay shakes his head because he honestly doesn't know. Something to do with the Eridanis shoving Sheppard into that cell with his face covered in blood, how Sheppard had fallen to his knees and met McKay's eyes and smiled at him like it was any other day, hey buddy how you been, that pretty fishhooked smile that was maybe the worst thing McKay's ever seen in his life, and what's that mean, what's he supposed to do with it?
McKay clears his throat. "Maybe it's like. Saturation. Maybe the accumulation is the point. It's been three years. We've come to. Rely on you."
A pause, and McKay realizes in an absent kind of way that he's holding his breath. In his peripheral vision Sheppard's fingers work down another stalk of grass, breaking it into pieces smaller than confetti.
"You have, huh," Sheppard says in a low voice, and McKay fights off a shiver.
"Yes, yes of course, we all do. Everyone."
Sheppard's hand still, bits of grass sprinkling down. McKay is aware that Sheppard's eyes are on him, and it seems incredibly important that he not look back in turn.
"Except you're the only one mad at me right now."
That's not true. McKay's chest hurts with how very much that is not true.
"I wouldn't call it--I'm not mad," McKay says.
"You do a really good impression then."
"I don't," and McKay stops, sucks in a quick breath. "I don't really know what to call it, actually."
Sheppard makes a small noise that kinda falls and agrees with him, know what you mean, and that's weird because Sheppard can't know what McKay means if McKay doesn't know what McKay means. He forgets himself and looks over at Sheppard, catching Sheppard looking back, all soft and strange around the eyes.
A breath sticks in McKay's throat. He says, "I think I'd go crazy if you got killed," without planning it, without even knowing that it was there to be said.
Sheppard's eyes go wide, his face blanking at once and something shuts hard in McKay. He flinches and goes cold and rips his eyes away from Sheppard, lifting them desperately to the sky.
Then Sheppard's hand is on his face, Sheppard's rough fingertips sliding clumsily over McKay's jaw, and McKay turns back to him against his will, his mouth twisted in a hard line but Sheppard doesn't care, Sheppard kisses him anyway. Off-line and quick and scraping sweet, Sheppard's lower lip dragging against his own, and then Sheppard pulls back, looking dumbstruck.
McKay gapes at him. His mouth tingles and feels unwieldy, as if it would be swollen to the touch. Sheppard kissed him. Heat uncoils in McKay's stomach, flushing his skin as he watches Sheppard's face turn slowly red, and they must be feeling the exact same thing right now, their bodies in an echo loop.
"I, uh," Sheppard says, and then cuts himself off, stymied. He fishes for words, and McKay stares at his mouth, imagines the soft shape of it crumpling, breaking, kissed too hard.
"Why did you do that?" McKay asks slowly.
Sheppard shakes his head, a frantic edge shivering through his eyes. "I don't know," and his voice cracks, shocking them both. Sheppard clears his throat harshly, sounds painful, and then he's scrambling to his feet, one hand jerking out a fistful of yellow grass. "Sorry."
"No, hey," McKay says, meaning, don't go, you idiot, and maybe a little bit, don't be sorry, but Sheppard is already into the trees, shoulders up and head down, unreachable.
*
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