TEAM WORK: forbidden fruit, "But I Ain't Got Wings"
Title: But I Ain't Got Wings
Author: grammarwoman
Team: Work
Prompt: forbidden fruit
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: R
Warnings: None
Summary: When Rodney finds some plans for a flying device in the Ancient database, John wants one... badly.
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**
This is nice, John thought to himself as he looked around the table at his team, together for a rare lunch meet-up. There had never seemed to be time when Atlantis was still based on Earth, and it had taken a while to settle into new routines back home in the Pegasus Galaxy. Teyla had brought Torren to the cafeteria to show him off and let him try out the cooks’ latest experiments in baby food, so John had made sure to grab Rodney out of his lab and pull Ronon away from pounding on the latest batch of Marines to join them. The kid was less interested in eating than watching in amazement as Rodney simultaneously inhaled his meal and yammered on about the progress he’d made in his battle with the Ancient database. Now that Rodney was a galaxy away from endless meetings at the SGC and being pimped out to Area 51, he had retreated back into his favorite research with a vengeance.
As Teyla tried to feed Torren with a game of “Here comes the jumper!” with no success, John stifled a chuckle. He didn’t want to get hit with an ‘accidental’ spray of food.
Ronon was watching, too; he chomped the rest of his sandwich and boosted Torren over to his own lap. “Eat,” he said to Teyla. “I got him.”
“Thank you,” she sighed and proceeded to put Rodney’s speed-eating to shame.
Ronon opened his jaw exaggeratedly far at Torren, who mimicked him in wide-eyed wonder and then glared as Ronon shoved a spoonful of food in his mouth. He chewed a bit and found it acceptable, babbling a command at Ronon and smacking his lips.
With a scene like that, it wasn’t John’s fault that he had tuned out Rodney’s high-speed technobabble, until he heard “- for flying, some kind of bio-mechanical augmentation to enable a person to generate his own propulsion - “
“Wait a minute!” John gaped. “Are you telling me you found the plans for an Ancient jetpack?”
“Oh, now look who’s paying attention!” said Rodney. “It really is Pavlovian with you, isn’t it? Warships, jumpers, jetpacks - anything that gets your feet off the ground.”
Not that John would admit it, but Rodney had a point. The jumpers, man - if jumpers were people, he would have hit that like a ton of bricks. Even now, years in, he still had to fight an occasional inappropriate erection when he pulled off something truly cool. Though sometimes it was hard to separate his own feelings of accomplishment from the gleeful grin on Rodney’s face, which, come to think of it, would go a long way towards explaining the hard-ons.
But as awesome as the jumpers were - they weren’t really flying. Flying meant hard Gs, wind in your face through an open chopper window, the adrenaline high of pulling loose of gravity’s grasp and bursting through the clouds. Wrapped in the heavy shell of a Jumper, the display limited to the front view and the overly-helpful HUDs, with inertial dampeners buffering you from any sense of movement, flying was reduced to the feeling of taking an elevator into the atmosphere. John wanted to fly, needed to fly, like the internal pull of migrating birds to travel halfway across Earth to get where their instincts said they had to be. The air beckoned, and John had to soar.
Then Rodney had to go and crush his dreams.
“This is not actually a jetpack, you moron! Try a bionic implant that would fuse to your body on a permanent basis.”
“You don’t know for a fact that it’s permanent.” John winced at Rodney’s scornful glance. “Besides, what’s a little body mod among friends?”
“Body mod? Body mod? This is no tattoo or Prince Albert we’re talking here! You have no idea what kind of physiological effects this would have. No, Colonel, I am not helping you fuel your Superman fantasies by means of ill-conceived Ancient technology!”
“I thought Superman could fly ‘cause he was an alien,” said Ronon, still shoveling food into Torren’s insistent maw.
“I am not debating origin stories with someone who can’t even differentiate between Marvel and DC characters!” Rodney spluttered.
John pouted and turned back to his own lunch. Like Rodney had any room to talk about comic book legends. When it came down to it, John was really sick of his team always winning the superhero lottery and leaving him on the sidelines. Teyla and Ronon were fearsome enough in their own right, with Teyla’s freaky Wraith powers and Ronon’s insane attack expertise. Hyped up on Wraith enzyme, they’d been practically unstoppable.
Then there was Rodney. Occasionally, his intellect actually lived up to his supervillain-level of ego. Of course he had to go and discover a personal shield right after they’d arrived in Atlantis. At least he’d used it up to save the city and everyone in it, unlike that jackass Lucius who’d squandered it on cheap theatrics before giving it over to John. He hated hand-me-downs, especially ones that were broken.
Rodney’s hitting the fast track to Ascension was just adding insult to injury. It already wasn’t fair when his brain went into overdrive; the bonus telepathy, telekinesis, and healing powers were over the top. It almost served him right that his inability to relax was a near-fatal flaw. John ignored the twinge at that thought, flashing back to the panic mode Rodney had sent him into by passing out on his bed, that had only lifted when McKay was zapped back to his former self.
The final straw was when Rodney and Daniel Jackson brought back those freaking fantastic Asgard suits and then pronounced them off-limits to any aspiring superheroes. John frowned: stupid clones and their tolerance for radiation.
Sure, John had enjoyed some nifty powers so very briefly after his run-in with Ellia. Finally proving her match while sparring with Teyla and trouncing Ronon in their morning run had been sweet. The Spiderman jumping action was even cooler. But he could have done without the berserker rages, the out-of-nowhere macking on Teyla, and especially turning into a fucking bug.
Lunch ended with Teyla retrieving a full Torren from Ronon with a grateful smile and departing, and Rodney scooping up his laptop and dashing back to the lab. Ronon looked down at John’s half-eaten lunch. “You done?”
John understood the unspoken offer of company and waved him off. “It's fine - I’m going to finish up here.”
Ronon nodded and left.
John poked at his food, trying to look interested in it as he obsessed over Rodney’s discovery. It was crappy timing that Rodney had found it under Woolsey’s command. John totally could have sweet-talked Elizabeth into letting him take it out for a spin. Well, maybe not sweet-talked, but with emergencies popping up every other day, he could have found a good excuse, some death-defying mission that urgently required it. Sam could have been convinced of its military applications, a potential way to boost every Gate team’s arsenal that needed to be vetted right away.
But even if Rodney’s objections could be overridden, Woolsey would never allow John to test it on himself. No, John’s prize would be shipped back to Earth and studied exhaustively for years before they even considered a human trial, and the list of likely candidates for that would not include a pain-in-the-ass Colonel in another galaxy. A certain pain-in-the-ass General, if denied a spot himself on the list, would probably see to that.
John’s only chance was to keep it a secret, and to somehow convince Rodney to let him try it out. The first part would be no sweat: Rodney was still stinging from Dr. Jackson’s highhanded takeover of Janus’ lab. He knew all too well that the IOA would haul away anything that piqued their interest. The second part, though, would require some planning. He dumped his lunch tray at the door and set off to Rodney’s lab for some reconnaissance.
Somehow, John was not at all surprised that Rodney gave him a hard time when he asked to look at the schematics.
“Sheppard, really, what part of ‘this is not a jetpack, you moron’ did you fail to understand? “ Even as he complained, his fingers flashed over the keyboard to retrieve the entry. John couldn’t remember exactly when he’d discovered the perfect balance of whining and pouting that pushed Rodney into doing what he asked, but he was careful not to abuse it.
When the plans were loaded on the screen, John nearly forgot to breathe. They were elegant and beautiful, stripped down and organic in a way that looked closer to Wraith technology than the Ancients’ geometrical designs. There were fusions of metal throughout the skeleton for support, looking something like Wolverine’s X-rays, but instead of claws, the hands had thin membranes that stretched between the fingers, with elongated and similarly webbed feet. Judging by the tendrils creeping into the brain, the tech involved some kind of extensive mental component.
“Typical,” Rodney scoffed. “There’s almost nothing in here about the energy source, like how to build the micro ZPMs this would require, or how to maintain or upgrade the system. And I think...” He stabbed at the keyboard, flipping through pages faster than John could keep up. “Aha! Their installation plan was using something along the lines of Replicator nanites. So the whole thing would be acutely susceptible to EMP blasts.”
John reverently touched the screen. None of Rodney’s complaints mattered against the possibility that with this, he could fly.
“Sheppard? Sheppard!” Rodney yanked John’s hand away from the screen. John turned to glare at him. “Are you even listening to me, you fluffy-headed flyboy?”
From the snap in his voice, Rodney had lost any semblance of patience with him, moving right past the standard “Let me dumb it down for you some more” to “Do you have any higher brain functions left at all, or has your limbic system gone completely autonomic?” levels of sarcasm. There were several stages in between those two extremes, all easily recognizable by the distance of Rodney’s incredulous eyebrows from the angry twist of his mouth. At least John thought they were distinguishable, but he wondered sometimes if he were the only one.
“Good God, Colonel, this isn’t a dream come true. This is a poisoned apple, waiting to take out any lamebrained losers who fall for it, just like all the other flawed Ancient designs.”
John yanked his hand out of Rodney’s grasp. “But with a little bit of work, Rodney...”
Rodney folded his arms and sneered, “Not even if you dropped down on your knees and gave me the world’s greatest blowjob!”
John gulped at the visual image that inspired, featuring as it did in one of his favorite fantasies. His reply came an awkward few seconds too late. “What? No! How could you...Fine. Whatever.” He hoped that his stomping away from Rodney was convincingly angry and covered up the way his dick had sprung up at the suggestion.
“Sheppard!” Rodney sounded as close to concerned as he could get, coming right off a rant. “Wait a minute. It's not like I don't have a pretty good idea of how much you must want this.”
“I really don’t think you do, Rodney.” John was careful to stay turned away, thinking desperately of cold showers and Iratus bugs to tamp down his arousal.
“Right, because you don’t dream of flying as often as I do of winning a Nobel and forcing all my so-called colleagues to grovel at my greatness.”
“What can I say? My dreams aren’t quite as petty as yours.” Dreams like the end of DADT, and not having to be so afraid of showing how he felt about Rodney, or even thinking about how he felt. John figured that stood pretty well as an exit line, so he left while he had the upper hand.
The problem was, he had no idea where to go next. Sulking in his room seemed a little childish, while tackling paperwork in his office would be too responsible for his current mood. He settled on a fast and furious workout in the gym.
Just as he was finishing up, Teyla came in, rolling her shoulders and neck as if to work out some stiffness. “Torren giving you a hard time?” he asked.
Teyla grinned. “Something like that, yes. I was playing with him to tire him out for his nap, but I fear that it ended rather differently.”
John nodded and went to gather up his stuff. Teyla caught his arm when he walked past.
“John. Is everything all right?”
He shrugged. He thought he’d be able to lose himself in exercise, but he couldn’t stop thinking of wind in his face and the ground far below him. “I’m fine.”
“John.” Teyla had that firm note in her voice, the one that meant she had picked up on something and wouldn’t let it go. Great, he thought, now she had super-Mommy senses, too.
He took a deep breath and tried to funnel the frustration in his head into words that could actually make it out of his mouth. “I’ve been... thinking.”
“About what?”
“About.” He paused. “How cool it would be if I could fly. Like, on missions and stuff.”
Teyla looked at him, puzzled. “Do we not fly in the jumpers?”
“It’s not the same.”
Teyla bit her lip and thought for a moment. "I was raised to revere the Ancestors, those Ancients that created so many marvels. I have learned since then that they were just as flawed as we are, prone to bad decisions and clinging to ill-conceived ideas. That they had the means to realize all their whims, does not excuse them from having done so."
"You've been listening to McKay, haven't you?"
"More than you have, it seems."
John tried to think of a good retort, but this was already dangerously close to being a serious discussion. If he stayed any longer, she’d weasel him into talking about his feelings or something else just as bad.
“Right. Thanks, Teyla, good talking to you.” He grabbed his bag and scooted out before she could catch him again.
He headed back to his quarters for a shower. It got the grime and sweat off him, but did nothing to clear his mind. He wished for the thousandth futile time that he had half Rodney’s talents in engineering and Ancient jerry-rigging. He’d managed to pick up some basic techniques, but anything else would take Rodney’s brain and skillful hands... which led him right back into thinking about something he had no business thinking. He ignored the interest perking up again down below and walked naked out of the bathroom, towel-drying his hair and singing “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.”
Only to find Rodney sitting on his bed with one of John’s comic books in his hands, staring right at him.
“Jesus, Rodney, don’t you ever knock?” John hastily wrapped the towel around his waist and turned to fumble some clothes out of his drawer.
John braced for the sarcastic volley Rodney was going to lob at him. Any time now.
But there was nothing but silence coming from the bed. John sneaked a glance over his shoulder. Rodney was frozen, his face a comic mask of confusion and… something else, something John couldn’t quite place.
“Rodney, you OK there?” Damn it. He could feel the towel slipping down his waist, but he couldn’t find any clean underwear in the drawer, which meant raiding the laundry basket on the other side of the bed. Which still held Rodney. Who was still suspiciously quiet.
John did his best to look as irritated as possible while sidling past Rodney. He was getting more practice in evasive maneuvers on the ground today than he had for the last month in the air. It was good news for Atlantis, but bad for him.
John had almost made it to the relative safety of the other side of the bed when Rodney spoke.
“I was coming over here to see if you were still obsessing about the stupid aero-apparatus. I mean, it’s a blatantly absurd idea, but I didn’t want you to stay mad about it.”
“Aero-apparatus?” John couldn’t help saying.
“Well, that’s better than ‘Ancient jetpack’, thank you very much!” Rodney snapped. His hands, usually airborne to direct his frustrations, were instead busy in his lap curling and uncurling John’s comic book. It was weirdly hypnotic, but not a safe place for John's focus to be.
“So you just decided to barge in and do what? Apologize?”
“I’m the first to admit that I’m not the greatest with, you know, understanding the interpersonal side of, well, persons.”
“Really,” John drawled. “Never would have guessed it.”
“Shut up,” Rodney said, lacking his usual bite. “But I couldn’t help but notice that when I said that, uh, blowjob thing, that you didn’t exactly respond with the typical military kneejerk homophobic rage.”
“Maybe that’s because we’re not all queer-bashing assholes?” John was starting to get nervous. He’d thought he could depend on Rodney to be the last one to develop any kind of insightful enlightenment. Evidently, he was experiencing catastrophic pokerface failure.
“So I thought to myself that it warranted further investigation, and I had this whole idea of coming here and jokingly offering you sexual favors to drop the whole thing. Just to judge your reaction, of course.”
John couldn’t help himself. He gulped and clutched his towel tighter around his waist.
“But then you walked out of the shower all... nude and, “ Rodney coughed, “excited, singing about a man, and you didn’t assault me for staring, which, by the way, thank you.”
John nodded automatically. “Sure.”
“So I thought that maybe my joke wasn’t really a joke, and that maybe if I did offer you, uh, sexual favors as it were, that you wouldn’t punch me or throw me off the team or end our friendship, and ohGodJohncanIpleaseblowyounow?”
Rodney’s eyes were the bluest John had ever seen them, huge and pleading. The comic book in his hands had been wrung into a crumpled mess, but John found he didn’t mind at all.
Luckily, he already had the right word on his lips. “Sure,” he said again, as the towel dropped from his numb hands.
John marvelled at the look of relief on Rodney's face. If that was how he appeared before sex, he couldn't wait to see him afterward.
"Yes!" Rodney said, making grabby hands at John.
"Wait, no." There was something John was forgetting.
"No? What happened to 'Sure'?" Rodney was indignant.
"I mean, yes!" John said. "But first, you with the naked-making."
"Oh, right - good idea. Horrible syntax, but still a good idea." Rodney stood up and undressed in a mad scramble, nearly falling on his face in his hurry.
From the buzzing in his head, John wondered briefly if the oxygen level in the room had dipped. But there was Rodney, flushed in all the right places, waiting for him, practically panting for him.
"John?" Rodney asked. "Were there any other objections you wanted to raise, or are you just torturing me for fun?"
Right, John thought, Sex now, looking later.
"Change in plans," he said, right before he knocked Rodney back onto the bed and climbed on top. "I get to go first."
"Hey, wait a min-" Rodney's complaint was cut off with a moan, as John ran his hands up Rodney's thighs. He fitted his hands over the flare of Rodney's hips and leaned in, sucking in Rodney's cock in the same motion. He had hoped he could pull of the porn-star deep throating on the first pass, but had to settle for taking him in halfway. Judging from the unhinged noises Rodney was making, he was doing just fine.
Rodney's hands were petting John's shoulders and neck when Rodney found the sensitive spots behind John's ears with a swipe of his thumbs. He lingered there when John's mouth tightened around him in appreciation.
John was lost in sensation, crazy with the taste and feel of Rodney's cock in his mouth. In his fantasies, he hadn't accounted for Rodney's muttered gasps of "Oh, fuck, John!" and "Yes!" that spiralled upward in pitch. He had pictured himself lingering over the act, treating Rodney to a long, fantastically impressive blowjob, instead of sloppy licks and uneven suction.
But then Rodney's fingers tightened in John's hair, and his hips began bucking frantically against John's hands. "Please, John, please, I wanna," Rodney panted.
John slid his hands around to grab Rodney's ass and took him in as far as he could go. Rodney came with a shout, and despite John's best efforts, he couldn't swallow everything down. It didn't seem to matter to Rodney, though; right after John pulled off, Rodney hauled him up the bed and kissed him like John was his only source of air. By the time Rodney let him up from the kiss, John had lost track of anything but the twining of Rodney's tongue with his, only to find himself mindlessly rubbing up against Rodney.
"You can officially torture me like that anytime," said Rodney. His grin of delight was one John had never seen, and he resolved to make Rodney smile like that as often as possible.
"However, you distracted me from my original purpose." Before John could say a word, Rodney heaved up and spun them around. John reached out to brace himself; Rodney grabbed his hands and pinned them to the bed.
John had spent some time thinking about Rodney's mouth, but Rodney had evidently plotted an entire fucking thesis on John's cock. He didn't get balls-deep on the first swallow either, but he came pretty damned close. John groaned; he was too close himself. Between the wicked swirl of Rodney's tongue around the head and shaft of John's cock, and the soft scratching of Rodney's stubble on John's inner thighs, John was rapidly approaching overload in an embarrassingly short time. Then Rodney looked up at him with eyes like the bluest skies, and John was gone.
They collapsed together sideways on the bed, John just as sweaty as before his shower, and Rodney with the most improbable sex hair John had ever seen. It was a good thing that he was still blissed out; otherwise, his cheeks might have hurt from how wide he was grinning.
“So I was thinking,” Rodney started.
“You’ve been doing that a lot today, I’ve noticed,” John replied, poking Rodney in a ticklish spot. Rodney swiped at him; John stopped and rested his hand on Rodney’s stomach instead.
Rodney patted his hand. “To your benefit, yes?”
“Hell yes," John agreed.
“So anyway, I can’t build you the apparatus -”
John couldn’t help the whine that escaped.
Rodney looked at him. “Stop that, you're acting like a kicked puppy. I could, however, build you a flight simulator of what it would be like to use it.”
“Huh.” John stared off into space, pondering Rodney’s offer.
“Hey! I think a ‘thank you’ would work pretty well here!”
“Yeah, thanks,” John said, “but...”
"What? What else could you possibly want?"
John smirked. "I dunno, a cheat code for having sex in midair?"
“Sheppard, you’re a more twisted piece of work than anything in the database.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“Oh, you are so dead!” Rodney smacked him in the face with a pillow. John laughed, feeling lighter than air.
**
Poll
Author: grammarwoman
Team: Work
Prompt: forbidden fruit
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: R
Warnings: None
Summary: When Rodney finds some plans for a flying device in the Ancient database, John wants one... badly.
Once you've read the story, please take a moment to vote in the poll below. Ratings go from 1 (low) to 9 (high), so all you need to do is enter a single number in that range into each text entry box. You'll be able to see the Prompt and Team (Genre) information in the header above.
More details about the voting procedure can be found here.
**
This is nice, John thought to himself as he looked around the table at his team, together for a rare lunch meet-up. There had never seemed to be time when Atlantis was still based on Earth, and it had taken a while to settle into new routines back home in the Pegasus Galaxy. Teyla had brought Torren to the cafeteria to show him off and let him try out the cooks’ latest experiments in baby food, so John had made sure to grab Rodney out of his lab and pull Ronon away from pounding on the latest batch of Marines to join them. The kid was less interested in eating than watching in amazement as Rodney simultaneously inhaled his meal and yammered on about the progress he’d made in his battle with the Ancient database. Now that Rodney was a galaxy away from endless meetings at the SGC and being pimped out to Area 51, he had retreated back into his favorite research with a vengeance.
As Teyla tried to feed Torren with a game of “Here comes the jumper!” with no success, John stifled a chuckle. He didn’t want to get hit with an ‘accidental’ spray of food.
Ronon was watching, too; he chomped the rest of his sandwich and boosted Torren over to his own lap. “Eat,” he said to Teyla. “I got him.”
“Thank you,” she sighed and proceeded to put Rodney’s speed-eating to shame.
Ronon opened his jaw exaggeratedly far at Torren, who mimicked him in wide-eyed wonder and then glared as Ronon shoved a spoonful of food in his mouth. He chewed a bit and found it acceptable, babbling a command at Ronon and smacking his lips.
With a scene like that, it wasn’t John’s fault that he had tuned out Rodney’s high-speed technobabble, until he heard “- for flying, some kind of bio-mechanical augmentation to enable a person to generate his own propulsion - “
“Wait a minute!” John gaped. “Are you telling me you found the plans for an Ancient jetpack?”
“Oh, now look who’s paying attention!” said Rodney. “It really is Pavlovian with you, isn’t it? Warships, jumpers, jetpacks - anything that gets your feet off the ground.”
Not that John would admit it, but Rodney had a point. The jumpers, man - if jumpers were people, he would have hit that like a ton of bricks. Even now, years in, he still had to fight an occasional inappropriate erection when he pulled off something truly cool. Though sometimes it was hard to separate his own feelings of accomplishment from the gleeful grin on Rodney’s face, which, come to think of it, would go a long way towards explaining the hard-ons.
But as awesome as the jumpers were - they weren’t really flying. Flying meant hard Gs, wind in your face through an open chopper window, the adrenaline high of pulling loose of gravity’s grasp and bursting through the clouds. Wrapped in the heavy shell of a Jumper, the display limited to the front view and the overly-helpful HUDs, with inertial dampeners buffering you from any sense of movement, flying was reduced to the feeling of taking an elevator into the atmosphere. John wanted to fly, needed to fly, like the internal pull of migrating birds to travel halfway across Earth to get where their instincts said they had to be. The air beckoned, and John had to soar.
Then Rodney had to go and crush his dreams.
“This is not actually a jetpack, you moron! Try a bionic implant that would fuse to your body on a permanent basis.”
“You don’t know for a fact that it’s permanent.” John winced at Rodney’s scornful glance. “Besides, what’s a little body mod among friends?”
“Body mod? Body mod? This is no tattoo or Prince Albert we’re talking here! You have no idea what kind of physiological effects this would have. No, Colonel, I am not helping you fuel your Superman fantasies by means of ill-conceived Ancient technology!”
“I thought Superman could fly ‘cause he was an alien,” said Ronon, still shoveling food into Torren’s insistent maw.
“I am not debating origin stories with someone who can’t even differentiate between Marvel and DC characters!” Rodney spluttered.
John pouted and turned back to his own lunch. Like Rodney had any room to talk about comic book legends. When it came down to it, John was really sick of his team always winning the superhero lottery and leaving him on the sidelines. Teyla and Ronon were fearsome enough in their own right, with Teyla’s freaky Wraith powers and Ronon’s insane attack expertise. Hyped up on Wraith enzyme, they’d been practically unstoppable.
Then there was Rodney. Occasionally, his intellect actually lived up to his supervillain-level of ego. Of course he had to go and discover a personal shield right after they’d arrived in Atlantis. At least he’d used it up to save the city and everyone in it, unlike that jackass Lucius who’d squandered it on cheap theatrics before giving it over to John. He hated hand-me-downs, especially ones that were broken.
Rodney’s hitting the fast track to Ascension was just adding insult to injury. It already wasn’t fair when his brain went into overdrive; the bonus telepathy, telekinesis, and healing powers were over the top. It almost served him right that his inability to relax was a near-fatal flaw. John ignored the twinge at that thought, flashing back to the panic mode Rodney had sent him into by passing out on his bed, that had only lifted when McKay was zapped back to his former self.
The final straw was when Rodney and Daniel Jackson brought back those freaking fantastic Asgard suits and then pronounced them off-limits to any aspiring superheroes. John frowned: stupid clones and their tolerance for radiation.
Sure, John had enjoyed some nifty powers so very briefly after his run-in with Ellia. Finally proving her match while sparring with Teyla and trouncing Ronon in their morning run had been sweet. The Spiderman jumping action was even cooler. But he could have done without the berserker rages, the out-of-nowhere macking on Teyla, and especially turning into a fucking bug.
Lunch ended with Teyla retrieving a full Torren from Ronon with a grateful smile and departing, and Rodney scooping up his laptop and dashing back to the lab. Ronon looked down at John’s half-eaten lunch. “You done?”
John understood the unspoken offer of company and waved him off. “It's fine - I’m going to finish up here.”
Ronon nodded and left.
John poked at his food, trying to look interested in it as he obsessed over Rodney’s discovery. It was crappy timing that Rodney had found it under Woolsey’s command. John totally could have sweet-talked Elizabeth into letting him take it out for a spin. Well, maybe not sweet-talked, but with emergencies popping up every other day, he could have found a good excuse, some death-defying mission that urgently required it. Sam could have been convinced of its military applications, a potential way to boost every Gate team’s arsenal that needed to be vetted right away.
But even if Rodney’s objections could be overridden, Woolsey would never allow John to test it on himself. No, John’s prize would be shipped back to Earth and studied exhaustively for years before they even considered a human trial, and the list of likely candidates for that would not include a pain-in-the-ass Colonel in another galaxy. A certain pain-in-the-ass General, if denied a spot himself on the list, would probably see to that.
John’s only chance was to keep it a secret, and to somehow convince Rodney to let him try it out. The first part would be no sweat: Rodney was still stinging from Dr. Jackson’s highhanded takeover of Janus’ lab. He knew all too well that the IOA would haul away anything that piqued their interest. The second part, though, would require some planning. He dumped his lunch tray at the door and set off to Rodney’s lab for some reconnaissance.
Somehow, John was not at all surprised that Rodney gave him a hard time when he asked to look at the schematics.
“Sheppard, really, what part of ‘this is not a jetpack, you moron’ did you fail to understand? “ Even as he complained, his fingers flashed over the keyboard to retrieve the entry. John couldn’t remember exactly when he’d discovered the perfect balance of whining and pouting that pushed Rodney into doing what he asked, but he was careful not to abuse it.
When the plans were loaded on the screen, John nearly forgot to breathe. They were elegant and beautiful, stripped down and organic in a way that looked closer to Wraith technology than the Ancients’ geometrical designs. There were fusions of metal throughout the skeleton for support, looking something like Wolverine’s X-rays, but instead of claws, the hands had thin membranes that stretched between the fingers, with elongated and similarly webbed feet. Judging by the tendrils creeping into the brain, the tech involved some kind of extensive mental component.
“Typical,” Rodney scoffed. “There’s almost nothing in here about the energy source, like how to build the micro ZPMs this would require, or how to maintain or upgrade the system. And I think...” He stabbed at the keyboard, flipping through pages faster than John could keep up. “Aha! Their installation plan was using something along the lines of Replicator nanites. So the whole thing would be acutely susceptible to EMP blasts.”
John reverently touched the screen. None of Rodney’s complaints mattered against the possibility that with this, he could fly.
“Sheppard? Sheppard!” Rodney yanked John’s hand away from the screen. John turned to glare at him. “Are you even listening to me, you fluffy-headed flyboy?”
From the snap in his voice, Rodney had lost any semblance of patience with him, moving right past the standard “Let me dumb it down for you some more” to “Do you have any higher brain functions left at all, or has your limbic system gone completely autonomic?” levels of sarcasm. There were several stages in between those two extremes, all easily recognizable by the distance of Rodney’s incredulous eyebrows from the angry twist of his mouth. At least John thought they were distinguishable, but he wondered sometimes if he were the only one.
“Good God, Colonel, this isn’t a dream come true. This is a poisoned apple, waiting to take out any lamebrained losers who fall for it, just like all the other flawed Ancient designs.”
John yanked his hand out of Rodney’s grasp. “But with a little bit of work, Rodney...”
Rodney folded his arms and sneered, “Not even if you dropped down on your knees and gave me the world’s greatest blowjob!”
John gulped at the visual image that inspired, featuring as it did in one of his favorite fantasies. His reply came an awkward few seconds too late. “What? No! How could you...Fine. Whatever.” He hoped that his stomping away from Rodney was convincingly angry and covered up the way his dick had sprung up at the suggestion.
“Sheppard!” Rodney sounded as close to concerned as he could get, coming right off a rant. “Wait a minute. It's not like I don't have a pretty good idea of how much you must want this.”
“I really don’t think you do, Rodney.” John was careful to stay turned away, thinking desperately of cold showers and Iratus bugs to tamp down his arousal.
“Right, because you don’t dream of flying as often as I do of winning a Nobel and forcing all my so-called colleagues to grovel at my greatness.”
“What can I say? My dreams aren’t quite as petty as yours.” Dreams like the end of DADT, and not having to be so afraid of showing how he felt about Rodney, or even thinking about how he felt. John figured that stood pretty well as an exit line, so he left while he had the upper hand.
The problem was, he had no idea where to go next. Sulking in his room seemed a little childish, while tackling paperwork in his office would be too responsible for his current mood. He settled on a fast and furious workout in the gym.
Just as he was finishing up, Teyla came in, rolling her shoulders and neck as if to work out some stiffness. “Torren giving you a hard time?” he asked.
Teyla grinned. “Something like that, yes. I was playing with him to tire him out for his nap, but I fear that it ended rather differently.”
John nodded and went to gather up his stuff. Teyla caught his arm when he walked past.
“John. Is everything all right?”
He shrugged. He thought he’d be able to lose himself in exercise, but he couldn’t stop thinking of wind in his face and the ground far below him. “I’m fine.”
“John.” Teyla had that firm note in her voice, the one that meant she had picked up on something and wouldn’t let it go. Great, he thought, now she had super-Mommy senses, too.
He took a deep breath and tried to funnel the frustration in his head into words that could actually make it out of his mouth. “I’ve been... thinking.”
“About what?”
“About.” He paused. “How cool it would be if I could fly. Like, on missions and stuff.”
Teyla looked at him, puzzled. “Do we not fly in the jumpers?”
“It’s not the same.”
Teyla bit her lip and thought for a moment. "I was raised to revere the Ancestors, those Ancients that created so many marvels. I have learned since then that they were just as flawed as we are, prone to bad decisions and clinging to ill-conceived ideas. That they had the means to realize all their whims, does not excuse them from having done so."
"You've been listening to McKay, haven't you?"
"More than you have, it seems."
John tried to think of a good retort, but this was already dangerously close to being a serious discussion. If he stayed any longer, she’d weasel him into talking about his feelings or something else just as bad.
“Right. Thanks, Teyla, good talking to you.” He grabbed his bag and scooted out before she could catch him again.
He headed back to his quarters for a shower. It got the grime and sweat off him, but did nothing to clear his mind. He wished for the thousandth futile time that he had half Rodney’s talents in engineering and Ancient jerry-rigging. He’d managed to pick up some basic techniques, but anything else would take Rodney’s brain and skillful hands... which led him right back into thinking about something he had no business thinking. He ignored the interest perking up again down below and walked naked out of the bathroom, towel-drying his hair and singing “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.”
Only to find Rodney sitting on his bed with one of John’s comic books in his hands, staring right at him.
“Jesus, Rodney, don’t you ever knock?” John hastily wrapped the towel around his waist and turned to fumble some clothes out of his drawer.
John braced for the sarcastic volley Rodney was going to lob at him. Any time now.
But there was nothing but silence coming from the bed. John sneaked a glance over his shoulder. Rodney was frozen, his face a comic mask of confusion and… something else, something John couldn’t quite place.
“Rodney, you OK there?” Damn it. He could feel the towel slipping down his waist, but he couldn’t find any clean underwear in the drawer, which meant raiding the laundry basket on the other side of the bed. Which still held Rodney. Who was still suspiciously quiet.
John did his best to look as irritated as possible while sidling past Rodney. He was getting more practice in evasive maneuvers on the ground today than he had for the last month in the air. It was good news for Atlantis, but bad for him.
John had almost made it to the relative safety of the other side of the bed when Rodney spoke.
“I was coming over here to see if you were still obsessing about the stupid aero-apparatus. I mean, it’s a blatantly absurd idea, but I didn’t want you to stay mad about it.”
“Aero-apparatus?” John couldn’t help saying.
“Well, that’s better than ‘Ancient jetpack’, thank you very much!” Rodney snapped. His hands, usually airborne to direct his frustrations, were instead busy in his lap curling and uncurling John’s comic book. It was weirdly hypnotic, but not a safe place for John's focus to be.
“So you just decided to barge in and do what? Apologize?”
“I’m the first to admit that I’m not the greatest with, you know, understanding the interpersonal side of, well, persons.”
“Really,” John drawled. “Never would have guessed it.”
“Shut up,” Rodney said, lacking his usual bite. “But I couldn’t help but notice that when I said that, uh, blowjob thing, that you didn’t exactly respond with the typical military kneejerk homophobic rage.”
“Maybe that’s because we’re not all queer-bashing assholes?” John was starting to get nervous. He’d thought he could depend on Rodney to be the last one to develop any kind of insightful enlightenment. Evidently, he was experiencing catastrophic pokerface failure.
“So I thought to myself that it warranted further investigation, and I had this whole idea of coming here and jokingly offering you sexual favors to drop the whole thing. Just to judge your reaction, of course.”
John couldn’t help himself. He gulped and clutched his towel tighter around his waist.
“But then you walked out of the shower all... nude and, “ Rodney coughed, “excited, singing about a man, and you didn’t assault me for staring, which, by the way, thank you.”
John nodded automatically. “Sure.”
“So I thought that maybe my joke wasn’t really a joke, and that maybe if I did offer you, uh, sexual favors as it were, that you wouldn’t punch me or throw me off the team or end our friendship, and ohGodJohncanIpleaseblowyounow?”
Rodney’s eyes were the bluest John had ever seen them, huge and pleading. The comic book in his hands had been wrung into a crumpled mess, but John found he didn’t mind at all.
Luckily, he already had the right word on his lips. “Sure,” he said again, as the towel dropped from his numb hands.
John marvelled at the look of relief on Rodney's face. If that was how he appeared before sex, he couldn't wait to see him afterward.
"Yes!" Rodney said, making grabby hands at John.
"Wait, no." There was something John was forgetting.
"No? What happened to 'Sure'?" Rodney was indignant.
"I mean, yes!" John said. "But first, you with the naked-making."
"Oh, right - good idea. Horrible syntax, but still a good idea." Rodney stood up and undressed in a mad scramble, nearly falling on his face in his hurry.
From the buzzing in his head, John wondered briefly if the oxygen level in the room had dipped. But there was Rodney, flushed in all the right places, waiting for him, practically panting for him.
"John?" Rodney asked. "Were there any other objections you wanted to raise, or are you just torturing me for fun?"
Right, John thought, Sex now, looking later.
"Change in plans," he said, right before he knocked Rodney back onto the bed and climbed on top. "I get to go first."
"Hey, wait a min-" Rodney's complaint was cut off with a moan, as John ran his hands up Rodney's thighs. He fitted his hands over the flare of Rodney's hips and leaned in, sucking in Rodney's cock in the same motion. He had hoped he could pull of the porn-star deep throating on the first pass, but had to settle for taking him in halfway. Judging from the unhinged noises Rodney was making, he was doing just fine.
Rodney's hands were petting John's shoulders and neck when Rodney found the sensitive spots behind John's ears with a swipe of his thumbs. He lingered there when John's mouth tightened around him in appreciation.
John was lost in sensation, crazy with the taste and feel of Rodney's cock in his mouth. In his fantasies, he hadn't accounted for Rodney's muttered gasps of "Oh, fuck, John!" and "Yes!" that spiralled upward in pitch. He had pictured himself lingering over the act, treating Rodney to a long, fantastically impressive blowjob, instead of sloppy licks and uneven suction.
But then Rodney's fingers tightened in John's hair, and his hips began bucking frantically against John's hands. "Please, John, please, I wanna," Rodney panted.
John slid his hands around to grab Rodney's ass and took him in as far as he could go. Rodney came with a shout, and despite John's best efforts, he couldn't swallow everything down. It didn't seem to matter to Rodney, though; right after John pulled off, Rodney hauled him up the bed and kissed him like John was his only source of air. By the time Rodney let him up from the kiss, John had lost track of anything but the twining of Rodney's tongue with his, only to find himself mindlessly rubbing up against Rodney.
"You can officially torture me like that anytime," said Rodney. His grin of delight was one John had never seen, and he resolved to make Rodney smile like that as often as possible.
"However, you distracted me from my original purpose." Before John could say a word, Rodney heaved up and spun them around. John reached out to brace himself; Rodney grabbed his hands and pinned them to the bed.
John had spent some time thinking about Rodney's mouth, but Rodney had evidently plotted an entire fucking thesis on John's cock. He didn't get balls-deep on the first swallow either, but he came pretty damned close. John groaned; he was too close himself. Between the wicked swirl of Rodney's tongue around the head and shaft of John's cock, and the soft scratching of Rodney's stubble on John's inner thighs, John was rapidly approaching overload in an embarrassingly short time. Then Rodney looked up at him with eyes like the bluest skies, and John was gone.
They collapsed together sideways on the bed, John just as sweaty as before his shower, and Rodney with the most improbable sex hair John had ever seen. It was a good thing that he was still blissed out; otherwise, his cheeks might have hurt from how wide he was grinning.
“So I was thinking,” Rodney started.
“You’ve been doing that a lot today, I’ve noticed,” John replied, poking Rodney in a ticklish spot. Rodney swiped at him; John stopped and rested his hand on Rodney’s stomach instead.
Rodney patted his hand. “To your benefit, yes?”
“Hell yes," John agreed.
“So anyway, I can’t build you the apparatus -”
John couldn’t help the whine that escaped.
Rodney looked at him. “Stop that, you're acting like a kicked puppy. I could, however, build you a flight simulator of what it would be like to use it.”
“Huh.” John stared off into space, pondering Rodney’s offer.
“Hey! I think a ‘thank you’ would work pretty well here!”
“Yeah, thanks,” John said, “but...”
"What? What else could you possibly want?"
John smirked. "I dunno, a cheat code for having sex in midair?"
“Sheppard, you’re a more twisted piece of work than anything in the database.”
“I know you are, but what am I?”
“Oh, you are so dead!” Rodney smacked him in the face with a pillow. John laughed, feeling lighter than air.
**
Poll