I Was A Little Too Lonely (You Were a Little Too Late) - McKay/Sheppard, SGA
More graduation celebration story posting! I've had this story in my head since almost last summer, and while it could have been the sort of story I'd turn into 500,000 words, at this point I needed to just write it and set it free.
Erin McKeown's cover of Nat King Cole's song pulled the various loose pieces of the story together. This song makes me grin this big wide grin whenever I listen to it, and John and Rodney stories make me feel like I want to dance a wavy arms dance and sing along, so, it was a perfect match.
Title: I Was A Little Too Lonely (You Were a Little Too Late)
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis, no particular chronological context
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Randomly inspiring picture of: a beach hut!
John is building just about everything he can into the puddle jumper, because he’s been in it one too many times without the exact piece of equipment he needs and he finds nothing wrong in being prepared. Rodney is helping, although the way Rodney tells it, all of it was his idea in the first place.
Rodney makes John think very confused thoughts about friendship. He likes McKay, and he sure spends a lot of time with him, but he’s never known anyone so arrogant and so obscure at the same time. He thinks what he and McKay have is a whole other thing than friendship, but the only other thing John knows that exists between people who like each other is a relationship and that is absolutely not what he and McKay have.
John never suspects that Rodney has entirely different thoughts on what it is that he and John have.
To John, McKay is always just McKay. McKay is his game-playing buddy, his life-saving buddy, his tricked-out puddle jumper building buddy. McKay is the paranoid voice in his head that made him start obsessively upgrading the puddle jumper in the first place.
So when he takes it out for a test-flight with the new and improved directional display screen without asking Rodney if he wants to come along, he looks out at the blue sky and feels guilty. So guilty that he thinks he hears Rodney’s paranoid voice literally in his head. It’s actually the intercom, but for a brief, scary moment, John isn’t sure.
“Listen, Sheppard, the puddle jumper’s not - gone wrong, it’s - ” Rodney starts to go in and out.
“What, McKay! What’s wrong? Everything looks fine. McKay! What’s going on?”
“Just….just…..I’ll wait for you!” Rodney says, but John thinks he must have misheard because why would McKay say something like that. And then John feels the impact along with the sickening crunch of metal and everything goes black.
They search for him for two weeks before Elizabeth decides it’s time for a memorial service. Ronon says something short and surprisingly touching and Teyla makes everyone cry with her traditional Athosian blessing and Rodney gets up and gives a rambling speech about how he always knew John would do something stupid like this but that’s why they all loved him and then he runs off mid-sentence to test some new Ancient equipment they’ve found and no one sees him for three days.
When he reappears, he’s unshaven and about one more day away from looking like a genuine Mad Scientist. He cleans up, shaves, eats eight ham sandwiches and two pudding cups, and begins passing very methodically and very openly through the five stages of grief as though checking them off his to-do list for the whole of Atlantis to see.
It turns out that John isn’t dead, but recuperating from injuries on a part of the mainland they thought they Athosians had rejected. Apparently, a small group of loners had settled there. Cultural differences, they said. John soon came to realize that they were the Athosian version of stoners, staying up all night drinking a surprisingly tasty alcohol made in giant pots behind their straw-roofed huts, lighting bonfires and singing and dancing and, of course, smoking something with a very pungent scent.
John also came to realize, though quite later, that the reason the team never came for him was because, as many times as the “culturally different” Athosian exiles assured him they’d sent his message along to Atlantis, they simply never got around to doing it.
Four weeks after John discovered the lost colony of stoners, he’s healed enough to fly his puddle jumper home, and the puddle jumper, which it turned out malfunctioned because he'd miswired the heat-sensitive coffee maker he'd installed the day before - and he was going to find a way to blame this on Rodney - had been repaired by, of all people, the chief brewmaster of the exile colony.
The puddle jumper has also been redecorated, inside and out, to look more like a cabana than anything that could actually fly, but once John pulled some of the palm fronds and the leis from the console, he was ready to go.
The entirety of Atlantis stops for the day when John returns. Elizabeth gets teary and Ronon wants to know why John felt he had to leave for four weeks to become a cabana boy and the thing is, no one can find Rodney anywhere.
John does eventually, of course. Rodney says, from underside of a piece of equipment John thinks might be for hydroponics, “I spoke at your funeral.”
“Um, thanks?” John says. “Listen, McKay...”
Sparks fly out from the top of the equipment, which then begins to glow red. “Welcome back,” Rodney says, and it’s almost harsh and he’s afraid one of the sparks might catch his pants on fire and so he wanders away, tempted by the idea of sleep in a real bed, and he thinks he’ll figure out what the hell McKay’s angry about tomorrow.
At breakfast the next morning, John goes to sit with Ronan and Teyla, Elizabeth who’s reading papers. Rodney is sitting at the next table with a scientist who looks about twenty. The scientist is not crying and so John doesn’t understand what it is that he could possibly be doing sitting across from McKay.
“Is that - ?”
“Don’t go over there,” Elizabeth tries to say, but John takes his tray, sits down right next to Rodney.
“Um, hi,” John says to the kid.
There’s a long silence, which McKay breaks in a rush. “You were gone. I moved on.”
John stares at Rodney, and stares at the kid, and stares at Elizabeth who has come over and has her hand on John’s elbow.
“Can we talk?” she says to him, and tugs him away.
“Yeah,” he says, following her. “Yeah.”
Elizabeth clears her throat a few times before beginning. “Rodney was very upset when we thought we’d lost you. This is,” she looks over her shoulder at Rodney and the junior scientist, who is picking at Rodney’s toast, “This is good.”
“Sure,” John says, though he has no idea what is going on.
Later, on his way to meet Teyla to brief her on his time with a sub-group of her people, he sees Rodney and the kid kiss as they walk off down the corridor.
“Oh,” he says to Teyla.
“Yes,” Teyla says.
Rodney and the kid, who John learns is named Marc, appear to spend every crisis-free moment together. John goes back to working on the puddle jumper. He goes back to it because he needs a project. They never quite perfected the underwater steering to his liking, after all, and he hasn’t even added the fire extinguishing feature to the front. He can’t quite bring himself to remove the rattan seat covers on the pilot’s seat, though.
He does not think about Rodney, or how they’re not friends anymore, or what it all means. He tries not to remember that the last thing Rodney said before John crashed was that Rodney would wait for him. Rodney, apparently, was trying not to remember it either.
John keeps getting asked to tell stories about what everyone’s now calling his mainland vacation. Teyla especially remains fascinated by the stoner community, and so John talks about learning how to surf with a broken arm and the multitude of drink combinations that can be made from the homebrewed alcohol and at some point in the midst of telling story about the day he discovered even his bandages were soaked in the alcohol, John realizes Rodney has gotten up and is pacing back and forth across the room.
Suddenly, Rodney rushes forward, his face right up in John’s.
“You had a good time? We were mourning you, and you had fun?” Rodney sounds dangerous, and John takes a step back, but Rodney just takes a step forward. “You had fun and you - you - you got all tan! And I was here. All alone. No word from you. No message at all. Nothing.” Rodney finally steps back, takes a deep breath, and says, very quietly, “I thought we were - I thought - .” He sighs loudly and then stomps out of the room.
Later, while John is aimlessly roaming the corridors while telling himself he isn't looking for Rodney, he hears Rodney and Marc fighting in one of the labs. John distinctly hears, “Let me work!” and then Marc huffs past John, who tries to look inconspicuous by staring into his datapad. “You can tell him we’ve broken up,” Marc says, his back to John.
John calls out after him, “You should probably tell McKay that yourself.”
“Tell me what?” Rodney says at John’s shoulder.
“Nothing,” John says, still trying to poke at the datapad as though he was solving some time-sensitive problem and not actually eavesdropping on a break-up. “Your - Marc was just...he was just...”
“Want to go work on the puddle jumper?” Rodney says, and it’s a Rodney John hasn’t seen since before the accident, all the anger and resentment and confusion fallen away from his face. It’s his friend looking back at him.
“Ok,” John says.
Rodney pushes John up against the wall the moment the door of the puddle jumper closes behind them and John has the woven grass tapestry sliding off its hooks behind him but he doesn’t care because Rodney slides his hands up John’s arms, his fingers under the cuff of his t-shirt, and presses his nose to John’s neck. John makes a strangled noise and tenses, because this is new, this is very new, this has certainly never happened any of the other times Rodney asked if he wanted to work on the puddle jumper. But he tilts up his chin just the slightest bit, exposing his neck for Rodney. This seems to have been the right thing to do because Rodney looks extremely happy when he drags his teeth down John’s neck, slowly, and settles his hands around John’s hips.
“McKay?” John squeaks out, his voice breathy.
“Hmmph,” Rodney mumbles and then licks John’s Adam’s apple and up the other side of John’s neck in one long, wet trail.
“Rodney,” John tries again, his hands finding their way to Rodney’s hips, which only serves to bring Rodney closer. “I thought you said you’d….you’d…. moved on.”
Rodney takes a step back, but his hands are still on John’s shoulders, pushing him against the wall. “Well, obviously, I lied,” Rodney says, just before he kisses him.
“Right,” John says, when they part for breath. “Ok.”
One of the palm fronds falls from the ceiling and crashes to the floor.
“Also, we’re redecorating,” Rodney says. “I hate cabanas.”
Now that John thinks about it, he never really liked them much, either.
Erin McKeown's cover of Nat King Cole's song pulled the various loose pieces of the story together. This song makes me grin this big wide grin whenever I listen to it, and John and Rodney stories make me feel like I want to dance a wavy arms dance and sing along, so, it was a perfect match.
Title: I Was A Little Too Lonely (You Were a Little Too Late)
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis, no particular chronological context
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Randomly inspiring picture of: a beach hut!
John is building just about everything he can into the puddle jumper, because he’s been in it one too many times without the exact piece of equipment he needs and he finds nothing wrong in being prepared. Rodney is helping, although the way Rodney tells it, all of it was his idea in the first place.
Rodney makes John think very confused thoughts about friendship. He likes McKay, and he sure spends a lot of time with him, but he’s never known anyone so arrogant and so obscure at the same time. He thinks what he and McKay have is a whole other thing than friendship, but the only other thing John knows that exists between people who like each other is a relationship and that is absolutely not what he and McKay have.
John never suspects that Rodney has entirely different thoughts on what it is that he and John have.
To John, McKay is always just McKay. McKay is his game-playing buddy, his life-saving buddy, his tricked-out puddle jumper building buddy. McKay is the paranoid voice in his head that made him start obsessively upgrading the puddle jumper in the first place.
So when he takes it out for a test-flight with the new and improved directional display screen without asking Rodney if he wants to come along, he looks out at the blue sky and feels guilty. So guilty that he thinks he hears Rodney’s paranoid voice literally in his head. It’s actually the intercom, but for a brief, scary moment, John isn’t sure.
“Listen, Sheppard, the puddle jumper’s not - gone wrong, it’s - ” Rodney starts to go in and out.
“What, McKay! What’s wrong? Everything looks fine. McKay! What’s going on?”
“Just….just…..I’ll wait for you!” Rodney says, but John thinks he must have misheard because why would McKay say something like that. And then John feels the impact along with the sickening crunch of metal and everything goes black.
They search for him for two weeks before Elizabeth decides it’s time for a memorial service. Ronon says something short and surprisingly touching and Teyla makes everyone cry with her traditional Athosian blessing and Rodney gets up and gives a rambling speech about how he always knew John would do something stupid like this but that’s why they all loved him and then he runs off mid-sentence to test some new Ancient equipment they’ve found and no one sees him for three days.
When he reappears, he’s unshaven and about one more day away from looking like a genuine Mad Scientist. He cleans up, shaves, eats eight ham sandwiches and two pudding cups, and begins passing very methodically and very openly through the five stages of grief as though checking them off his to-do list for the whole of Atlantis to see.
It turns out that John isn’t dead, but recuperating from injuries on a part of the mainland they thought they Athosians had rejected. Apparently, a small group of loners had settled there. Cultural differences, they said. John soon came to realize that they were the Athosian version of stoners, staying up all night drinking a surprisingly tasty alcohol made in giant pots behind their straw-roofed huts, lighting bonfires and singing and dancing and, of course, smoking something with a very pungent scent.
John also came to realize, though quite later, that the reason the team never came for him was because, as many times as the “culturally different” Athosian exiles assured him they’d sent his message along to Atlantis, they simply never got around to doing it.
Four weeks after John discovered the lost colony of stoners, he’s healed enough to fly his puddle jumper home, and the puddle jumper, which it turned out malfunctioned because he'd miswired the heat-sensitive coffee maker he'd installed the day before - and he was going to find a way to blame this on Rodney - had been repaired by, of all people, the chief brewmaster of the exile colony.
The puddle jumper has also been redecorated, inside and out, to look more like a cabana than anything that could actually fly, but once John pulled some of the palm fronds and the leis from the console, he was ready to go.
The entirety of Atlantis stops for the day when John returns. Elizabeth gets teary and Ronon wants to know why John felt he had to leave for four weeks to become a cabana boy and the thing is, no one can find Rodney anywhere.
John does eventually, of course. Rodney says, from underside of a piece of equipment John thinks might be for hydroponics, “I spoke at your funeral.”
“Um, thanks?” John says. “Listen, McKay...”
Sparks fly out from the top of the equipment, which then begins to glow red. “Welcome back,” Rodney says, and it’s almost harsh and he’s afraid one of the sparks might catch his pants on fire and so he wanders away, tempted by the idea of sleep in a real bed, and he thinks he’ll figure out what the hell McKay’s angry about tomorrow.
At breakfast the next morning, John goes to sit with Ronan and Teyla, Elizabeth who’s reading papers. Rodney is sitting at the next table with a scientist who looks about twenty. The scientist is not crying and so John doesn’t understand what it is that he could possibly be doing sitting across from McKay.
“Is that - ?”
“Don’t go over there,” Elizabeth tries to say, but John takes his tray, sits down right next to Rodney.
“Um, hi,” John says to the kid.
There’s a long silence, which McKay breaks in a rush. “You were gone. I moved on.”
John stares at Rodney, and stares at the kid, and stares at Elizabeth who has come over and has her hand on John’s elbow.
“Can we talk?” she says to him, and tugs him away.
“Yeah,” he says, following her. “Yeah.”
Elizabeth clears her throat a few times before beginning. “Rodney was very upset when we thought we’d lost you. This is,” she looks over her shoulder at Rodney and the junior scientist, who is picking at Rodney’s toast, “This is good.”
“Sure,” John says, though he has no idea what is going on.
Later, on his way to meet Teyla to brief her on his time with a sub-group of her people, he sees Rodney and the kid kiss as they walk off down the corridor.
“Oh,” he says to Teyla.
“Yes,” Teyla says.
Rodney and the kid, who John learns is named Marc, appear to spend every crisis-free moment together. John goes back to working on the puddle jumper. He goes back to it because he needs a project. They never quite perfected the underwater steering to his liking, after all, and he hasn’t even added the fire extinguishing feature to the front. He can’t quite bring himself to remove the rattan seat covers on the pilot’s seat, though.
He does not think about Rodney, or how they’re not friends anymore, or what it all means. He tries not to remember that the last thing Rodney said before John crashed was that Rodney would wait for him. Rodney, apparently, was trying not to remember it either.
John keeps getting asked to tell stories about what everyone’s now calling his mainland vacation. Teyla especially remains fascinated by the stoner community, and so John talks about learning how to surf with a broken arm and the multitude of drink combinations that can be made from the homebrewed alcohol and at some point in the midst of telling story about the day he discovered even his bandages were soaked in the alcohol, John realizes Rodney has gotten up and is pacing back and forth across the room.
Suddenly, Rodney rushes forward, his face right up in John’s.
“You had a good time? We were mourning you, and you had fun?” Rodney sounds dangerous, and John takes a step back, but Rodney just takes a step forward. “You had fun and you - you - you got all tan! And I was here. All alone. No word from you. No message at all. Nothing.” Rodney finally steps back, takes a deep breath, and says, very quietly, “I thought we were - I thought - .” He sighs loudly and then stomps out of the room.
Later, while John is aimlessly roaming the corridors while telling himself he isn't looking for Rodney, he hears Rodney and Marc fighting in one of the labs. John distinctly hears, “Let me work!” and then Marc huffs past John, who tries to look inconspicuous by staring into his datapad. “You can tell him we’ve broken up,” Marc says, his back to John.
John calls out after him, “You should probably tell McKay that yourself.”
“Tell me what?” Rodney says at John’s shoulder.
“Nothing,” John says, still trying to poke at the datapad as though he was solving some time-sensitive problem and not actually eavesdropping on a break-up. “Your - Marc was just...he was just...”
“Want to go work on the puddle jumper?” Rodney says, and it’s a Rodney John hasn’t seen since before the accident, all the anger and resentment and confusion fallen away from his face. It’s his friend looking back at him.
“Ok,” John says.
Rodney pushes John up against the wall the moment the door of the puddle jumper closes behind them and John has the woven grass tapestry sliding off its hooks behind him but he doesn’t care because Rodney slides his hands up John’s arms, his fingers under the cuff of his t-shirt, and presses his nose to John’s neck. John makes a strangled noise and tenses, because this is new, this is very new, this has certainly never happened any of the other times Rodney asked if he wanted to work on the puddle jumper. But he tilts up his chin just the slightest bit, exposing his neck for Rodney. This seems to have been the right thing to do because Rodney looks extremely happy when he drags his teeth down John’s neck, slowly, and settles his hands around John’s hips.
“McKay?” John squeaks out, his voice breathy.
“Hmmph,” Rodney mumbles and then licks John’s Adam’s apple and up the other side of John’s neck in one long, wet trail.
“Rodney,” John tries again, his hands finding their way to Rodney’s hips, which only serves to bring Rodney closer. “I thought you said you’d….you’d…. moved on.”
Rodney takes a step back, but his hands are still on John’s shoulders, pushing him against the wall. “Well, obviously, I lied,” Rodney says, just before he kisses him.
“Right,” John says, when they part for breath. “Ok.”
One of the palm fronds falls from the ceiling and crashes to the floor.
“Also, we’re redecorating,” Rodney says. “I hate cabanas.”
Now that John thinks about it, he never really liked them much, either.