TEAM ANGST: Strategy, "In a Dark Wood"
Title: In a Dark Wood
Author: aesc ( interview)
Team: Angst
Prompt: Strategy
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: hard R
Warnings: violence, sex
Summary: A five-day hunt.
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**
IN A DARK WOOD
When they come, they come at odd moments, flickering but piercing sharp and deep like arrows.
A heavy, familiar body twists over him, down, into him, hands fierce on Rodney's hips and breath hot on his neck. Always, always this hunger the night before.
The images hover at the left side of memory; they have the quality of unreality, that they could not have happened - not when all he knows is the endless cathedral of forest, the terror tight around his throat - but still. Something in him refuses to believe they’re mere imagination.
John's mouth on his, tasting of salt and heady like wine, then teeth on his neck to scrape over delicate skin and he almost cries out but strangles it back, arching up against the assertion of John's body, wants to beg, to say please God let me come but the closeness of the night, of John, demands silence.
John. Important that name, for so many reasons, but he isn’t sure at the moment what they are, other than that the name attaches itself to those almost-memories, to safety and to home.
Home. He carefully pushes thoughts of that place aside and turns back to his current struggle.
He can't open his goddamn pack, the rawhide strings knotted shut, and tired of clawing at them and starved beyond all reason, he takes his knife and cuts them. He doesn't look at the dried blood on the blade when he does, but is careful to place the knife back in the sheath at his thigh.
The pouch holds a few pieces of bread, meat, some kind of fruit he doesn't know, sharp-smelling in a way that sets off alarm bells deep in his brain. Dangerous to try this, they say, but he's starving and ignores them and takes a bite. Instinctively he braces for the evaporation of breath, the deadly clench in his chest, and he should have... have something to break the worst of the reaction, but he doesn't and the reaction never comes.
He spits a seed out and wipes his mouth, and the back of his hand is filthy with sweat and dirt, but he's gone past caring. He eats everything, even the core, and licks his fingers. The copper of dried blood cuts the bitterness, the heaviness of alien soil, the hovering sweetness of the fruit.
Got to move again because he will be here soon, as he always is, this tracking, shadowing presence over Rodney's shoulder. Three times already he's been caught and three times almost been killed, and on the last try the difference between death and escape had been that, for the first time, Rodney had been willing to use his knife.
The second… He touches the bite mark at his neck, remembering lips on his skin and hot, fierce breath.
Laughter in his mouth, John teasing him because he can, slow, lazy strokes that take Rodney nowhere except frustration while John's fingers sketch him out, reducing him to the line of his collarbone, his back a wave that curves in answer to John's thrusts, plane of chest and the soft curve of belly to which John presses one callus-rough hand.
He shudders away from the thought and re-knots the pouch strings, checks the knife. The hilt is tacky under his hand, the wrapped leather still moist. The pouch and the knife are leather and metal, natural things against which his clothes are awkward, dark synthetic greys that don't belong.
The forest wraps him in its humid breath, heavy enough that carrying it is carrying weight, pressing sweat out of him. He's refilled his canteen six times, is almost on empty now but hesitates at finding his way to the stream to get more, because he'll be waiting there, knowing Rodney will eventually, somewhere, have to make his way down to the river to drink.
A faint animal path wends through the underbrush, but he'd lost the human-made road the first night out, when it had either fallen out from under him or he'd stumbled off it into the tangle of trees with their strangling vines and their roots that trip him. The only path he has is the river, a muted voice he's terrified to lose.
Thirst claws at him, his canteen perilously light after the sip he allows himself. Can't keep this up, he thinks again, and it's not a new thought.
At least Teyla and Ronon escaped. He pauses at the names and wonders over them.
Teyla and Ronon... Faces, both with dark eyes, one with a kind smile, the other framed by thick and ill-disciplined hair. They're gone, away, which is a good thing, he thinks distantly. Help. A word connected with those faces, those names: help, rescue, safety, home, that word again. He doesn't know, though, what happened to John. The last he'd seen--
Almost cruelly John twists into him, hips harsh against Rodney's thighs, fingers ringing his waist with bruises. Heat and heat, the two of them, and like breath they curl around one another.
The memory cuts off as he stumbles down the riverbank, pausing behind a glossy-leaved bush. No other sound but the river's green, endless murmuring, the brief agitation when it crosses over boulders downstream. The water he cups in his palms is muddied, mixed with chlorophyll and probably a million microbes, a miracle that he hasn't died of dysentery already.
The syringe waits in his pouch; he stares at his hands a moment longer then takes a deep, frantic gulp. Splash again, another mouthful and another, a few handfuls devoted to washing his arms. The water cleans away the dirt and reveals the scratches festering underneath, a deep gouge raking across one arm, and he looks at it a moment, trying to remember how he got it. It almost overlays another scar, this one older, white and thin, and looking at it he remembers wind and rain.
After drinking as much as he dares, he refills his canteen and caps it tightly. Two refills back he'd forgotten to do that, chased away from the river by something huge with teeth, and it had been miles before he'd found a way back to the river again.
That had been the third time he'd almost died, but he'd slipped on a slick of wet leaves and the knife raised to take him through the heart had missed.
Oh God. He tenses, listening, but there's only the river and his anxious breath. Something moves again on the far bank and he retreats into the undergrowth again, waits almost forever until a small deerlike thing creeps out and begins to drink.
A minute, that's what he needs, a minute--make it an hour, or a day, a night to get his head together. Thought comes, slow and clumsy with exhaustion and tripped up by the drug, but he has to move; he can't stay, although all he wants to do is sleep, bruises and cuts and all, the need for it running in a subliminal message under the metallic assertion of the drug. Sickness hovers deep in his stomach, held at bay by the evil-looking solution in the syringe in his pouch.
Out of everything he has, he guards this the most closely.
The drug holds back other things. He knows, knows he shouldn't have lived this long, should have died ten minutes out of the city, but he’s still alive, still running. And as for running, he can run faster, farther, the swollen right ankle should have him immobilized but it only slows him when he has to fix the rags and shoelace that brace it. There is a weakness in him that says these fruits, the dried meat and bread in his pouch shouldn't be enough to keep him functioning, but it's a muted whisper.
Think, because in the place connected with Teyla and Ronon and John, he’s the thinker, the smart one. He listens some more, there at the edge of the river, to the water and the birdcalls, the trilling insects that suddenly fall silent.
In his quarters it's warm, the air holding close the scent of the two of them, John sharp and rich with sweat and come, soap from the shower after his workout. Rodney tries to pull the sheet over them but John stops him and instead half-covers him, sleek, long-draped muscle, rolling them both into another kiss.
* * *
Softness cradles his head, his back, and light waits on the other side of his eyelids, unfiltered by a canopy of leaves.
Voices, friends' voices. Teyla. Ronon.
He listens for John.
* * *
The attack comes from his left, the side he always forgets about. Silent, dark, a shadow from shadows, the blade dulled with dirt and blood.
Rodney tries to twist away, only half-manages it; the knife misses his heart, slices through his shirt to ground itself in the mud. He slips, the mud organic and elusive under him, no help at all that the other man can't find purchase on it either. The knife blade scrapes his shoulder; he reaches to grab it, but a powerful hand locks around his wrist and pushes down, down so his forearm's pressed against his neck and oh God, he's going to die, he can feel his airway collapsing, blackness coming at the corner of his vision and his breath and terrified heart are the only things he can hear.
The pressure lifts a moment, death hesitating, and Rodney sees, haloed by specks of shadow, death's face, drawing back, caught in doubt.
He pushes hard, the last of his drug-fueled strength, and breaks free.
The knife lies on it side; he can grab it, maybe, and kill his hunter, leave him there on the bank for the river predators and the birds to eat. I can do it, he thinks and the drug transmutes terror into exultation, into power, as he stares wide-eyed at the hunter underneath him.
Kill, whispers an old voice in his blood, a voice the drug's unlocked and brought up from where civilization's buried it.
But he can’t, he can’t.
Instead he runs, to the river, to safety. The floor of the river drops off sharply, one step between tripping over slimy rocks and sudden swimming, and he claws at the water to pull himself up and across.
He makes it, choking and staggering, to the far bank and pulls himself up on a mud slick. His ankle throbs and his breath comes rough through a trachea that's probably been bruised. Over his shoulder he sees his shadow on the far bank, standing there and watching.
* * *
"Rodney?" A gentle, familiar voice, connected to dark eyes and a smile that is also gentle and familiar. "Rodney, please open your eyes."
He does, is surprised by the harsh artificial brightness and not the organic half-light of the jungle. Clean lines, metal, synthetics everywhere; only the woman in front of him is flesh and blood. The fading drug lets him pick up the faintest hint of her scent, warm and clean.
"Teyla," he says, the name that belongs to that voice and those eyes.
She smiles and nods. "Yes, Rodney. It is good to see you awake." Her hand is gentle on his shoulder, the one with the knife cut in it. He can feel the minor accent of pain, the irregularity of a new scar. "Can I get you anything?"
"Water," he whispers, and the cup she hands him is clear, the water clean and cold down his throat. She takes it from him before he can drink too much.
"Carson will be in soon," she tells him, moving gracefully to sit in the chair parked next to his bed, "but I asked him to leave us alone while we talk."
"Talk?" His mind fumbles away from her words, on a tangent marked by tangled vines and shadows, oppressive heat, fear. The hunter, four days being followed by him, four times almost dying and escaping barely each time. "You... you came," he mutters, holding on to that. "You got us out."
Teyla's mouth tightens and her gaze, usually so strong, slips to the side in evasion.
Another name comes to him.
John.
* * *
The fourth night he spends in a hollow under a long-dead tree, a rough cave carved out by roots and the course of an ancient flood. The syringe, three-quarters empty now, lies next to him. His clothes dry to his skin, chilling him even though the air is heavy with heat.
He'd thought about traveling during the night, but he can't navigate through the canopy. The only orientation he has is the river, which runs west to east, and the only goal he has is the stargate back near the city, but the hunter keeps him from it, herding him northeast.
Stargate. The word attaches itself to a gigantic circular frame, marked with signs and symbols. A thing for going places, for movement across worlds. A pattern of interconnected stars lays itself against the dark and transforms itself to home.
Home: a place of constant light, of a vault of stars. Water endlessly moving, the busy murmur of it always there in the back of his mind, not the slow course of the river behind him.
Home: a room, pictures on the wall, looking at himself in one of those pictures, looking at himself in a glass, perpetually startled blue eyes, sleep-disordered hair, then another face appearing over his shoulder with lazy green eyes and unruly dark hair, chin stubble-rough when its owner brushes it across Rodney's shoulder and bends to kiss bare skin.
The hunter's face.
Rodney jerks awake.
* * *
“Where’s John?” he asks.
Teyla’s hand goes tight on his
Carson comes in at that moment. A friend, Rodney remembers, whose face belongs with the beeping machines and quiet efficiency.
“How are you, Rodney?” he asks. He steps close to look at something over Rodney’s shoulder. Rodney inhales sharply, a noseful of antiseptic and latex that speaks more to his memory of Carson than anything else, and makes Carson real again.
“I…” He tries to look at what Carson’s doing, but his back throbs when he tries to move and the skin along the right side of his neck burns as though dusted with hot ash.
“Where’s John?”
_______
He pulls his shirt off and inspects the rust-red stain marking it before setting it aside. Skin rises pink and delicate around the gash, a little beneath his right nipple and raking through muscle, not infected yet and so unimportant. A soft smile touches his lips as he cleans the wound, sweet shiver of pain up his side when he presses pus from it and stretches to put on his shirt again.
That had been a surprise, the best kind of exhilaration.
The first time had been too easy, so he’d let him go, barely one day into the hunt.
He’d run, a terrified, straight line down the cattle track into the forest, and when the track had faded he’d plowed his own, crashing through vines and bracken and leaving a path clear as day to where he’d hidden in a cave.
It had been a matter of waiting, a shadow in shadows, for him to come out after deciding it must be safe, that danger had passed him by or had given up and left, but time dilates under the pressure of fear - and he was afraid. Stupid-afraid, and when he’d come out of the cave - a shiver races along him, thinking of the closeness, his own unaccountable hesitation.
Knife sinking into the flesh of one arm - he’d stopped, feeling the solid body freezing against him, a shiver into frightened stillness.
Let him go. He’d stepped back, stepped back from a certain kill, and the other had run away.
The blood from the wound on the other’s arm stained his own skin, tinted his tongue with copper warmth when he’d licked it off.
Other chances, five days of them, and though they’re on the fourth now, they can have more if he can elude the hunters who hunt him so they can play this forever.
Five days echoes through his bones. Five days to stalk, like child's play, chasing something this soft, but games are fun. Sixty men, so effortless, killing - the effort is in the chase, the invention. Distantly, he wonders what he'll do at the end of it, with blood-warmed hands and flesh cooling underneath him, if that will be the end or if there will be more, or if the game will be enough.
The second he’d taken him in shadow at the edge of night, flawless how he'd come through the darkness, a heartbeat between standing at the edge of the clearing and pressing himself to that strong, greyclad back, his knife to that throat, a hand on a wide forehead to pull it back so tendons and arteries strain against the angle.
Contours of muscle all along his chest, his belly, his thighs, and the scant light silvered frightened eyes and they were frozen like that, and when he dragged in a breath he dragged in scent and paralyzing memory--another closeness, another darkness, and he breathed into that warm ear words he couldn’t hear anymore but could feel.
It had been to throw him off, and a sharp elbow took him in the ribs--two of them buckled and he folded around the sudden flare of pain that the drug had snuffed out--but the shock of near-memory had kept him still long enough for his prey to vanish into the forest.
The third time had given him this wound, when the ground had suddenly fallen out from underneath them and the strike that had been meant for the heart had gone wide.
Off-balance, but even as he’d thought that and tried to right himself, steel flashed in the other’s hand and then -
A heavy weight on him that makes his heart kick in fierce response, not fear but excitement that made him grin even as the world blurred, narrowed to the knife coming closer, closer, and then in, a line of fire across his chest. Finally, finally, this was what the game was, this moment, the two of them tangled together and that solid, desperate, clumsy weight on top of him, flailing, fighting, and in another heartbeat he could turn, roll them, take that knife -
Then - then nothing. An absence of pressure, a moment to realize the hot stickiness of his own blood, and the other disappeared into the shadows.
He holds off for most of the fourth day, pressing northeast. The geography is alien to him, useless, with only the river giving direction. The other one, desperate and predictable, wants to return to the city, to safety and shelter, and along with the sweet hum of anticipation, the vision of that last attack, warm flesh under his hands, pressed into the earth, skin quivering under his breath, he knows they can't go back that way.
Not for the safety, but for some other reason that has to do with freedom from walls and those severe, pale faces and more than that, the two of them.
They. Paired, the two of them.
In the endless walk he pauses a few times for water, once for the fruit and a bite of the meat in his pouch, but they go stale next to the memory of the sharp sweat-scent in the hollow of the other man's neck, the promise of flesh close beneath his lips. Only the drug is sweeter, sharper, when he injects his daily ration of it, but even that fades when he thinks of biting that neck, the give of skin, the soft, paralyzed cry.
And he wants that again, the helplessness before dying. The need quivers in him,
He remembers this from years ago, the wicked thrill of pursuit. He remembers sixty of them dying, his fingers pressed to cool metal. The circumstances flicker on the edge of memory and vanish, unimportant - the sensation matters, the race of it up and down his spine, dark and fierce in his blood.
I do this, he thinks. This is his life, shaped to the pace of his prey--his terrified, staggering prey.
Different once, is a distant reminder, that once the hunt had been driven by necessity, the need to save, to bring out alive others more important than himself. It's a qualification easily dismissed; the drug runs roughshod over it.
A deep breath brings the scents of the forest to him, the thickness of growing things, the rot underfoot, and the sounds come too: birdcall, insects, the uneven footsteps he's chased for a day now. Wildlife has made a rough path near the river, with occasional beachheads near watering holes and the mud slicks where crocodiles sun themselves; at the edge of the path are broken twigs, and a large frond bent back where something large and clumsy had passed through.
He follows the track down to the river, stealing silently through the brush, knife like a talon in his hand.
Waiting for him there in a patch of sunlight: that familiar greyclad back, kneeling by the bank to scoop up water.
His foot slips on the mud--better traction without the boots but something in him tells him he needs to keep them on--and he crashes into the one he's followed, the breath exploding from his lungs. Desperate arch of the body under him, unexpected strength that knocks off his aim and the killing blow goes wide, takes him in the shoulder instead, bright flowering of blood against pale skin.
They roll clumsily for a moment, the quarry making the foolish attempt to go for the knife and he has him now, oh yes, fuck fuck fuck yes, and he jams that forearm against a protesting throat, presses and presses down and down.
Then: his eyes, oh God his eyes, wide and blue and sightless.
_______
“Where the hell is he?” his voice breaks around the dryness in his throat, and around fear.
“He’s resting,” Teyla says, glancing at Carson before looking back at Rodney. She wears confidence so well, but Rodney finds it hard to believe her. “You should rest as well, Rodney.”
“Not until I know where he is.” Exhaustion, the fading drug, clouds his memory.
John’s face in the mirror, morning-soft smile, the kiss on his shoulder - the left shoulder that wears a scar from John’s knife.
That wild face over him, green eyes glassy with predatory distance, pressing pressing down into him, fighting for air and failing -
“I’ve had him put in isolation.” Carson sighs, the put-upon sigh he uses whenever Rodney is being especially difficult. Given his situation, Rodney feels he’s well within his rights to be as difficult as he wants. “Not that you recall it, but the symptoms associated with enzyme withdrawal aren’t particularly pleasant.”
Rodney glances down at his right arm and there it is, a square of gauze taped over the injection site. It throbs with mean, tight pain, a burn that finds an echo along his right shoulder and neck. He touches them automatically, but there’s nothing there that he can feel.
“There is more,” Teyla says reluctantly, and nods at Carson.
Carson’s mouth thins, but he picks up a mirror from a tray of surgical implements and gives it to Rodney, who takes it and holds it up with a shaking hand.
* * *
The Marnae are a secretive people, cloistered away on their jungle world, but Pegasus legend has it that they are skilled at plant lore--"Primitive botanists," John says, and Rodney says, "Like there's any other kind"--and that the extracts they obtain from their plants are good for anything from analgesics to aphrodisiacs. Wilder legends say they possess the means to restore lost youth, but Teyla, whose father and grandfather have traded with them, dismisses the stories.
Thanos, tall and pale-skinned, youthful-looking under the tattoos of green and black, is the one who greets them and arranges for Teyla to speak with the master brewer, a fair-haired woman with fluttery hands and a quick, clipped way speaking. He's the one who leads Rodney and John through the stone-paved square, past the sculptures that line the center of it, up the serpent-carved steps of the temple.
He's the one who places them in a room in the temple and says their companions will be sent home, that the hunt will begin the following moon.
He's the one who walks away quietly, neat in his dark linen robes, while John curses him and shouts for him to come back, and when he does come back brings matching pouches, a pair of knives, canteens, and the rules of the hunt.
When he leaves again he takes John with him, leaving Rodney to the dark and the fierce hands of the Marnae priests, who push him onto a table. He struggles, bucking against them, shouting Fucking let me go, shouting for John, for anyone, but one of them has a powerful arm across his shoulders and is leaning down to hiss in his ear.
“If you wish no further pain, be still, hunter.”
He freezes, not from the fear of pain but because these guys are fucking strong and he isn’t going anywhere with five of them on top of him. One of the priests laughs, and in the anxious lamplight John sees a bowl of something, thick needles laid out next to it.
* * *
Wraith markings. Wraith writing, the symbols that designate the members of a particular Hive, and their property.
“We were - we were…” No.
“You should rest,” Teyla says. She takes the mirror from him. When he closes his eyes, he can see the black lines spidering up his neck to his cheekbone, can feel the ghost-touch of the priest who’d pushed his head to one side, exposing his neck and immobilizing him. Fear slices effortlessly through the fog of the drug. Now that he remembers he can feel the needles pressing the ink into his skin, the pattern twisting its dark way in angles and curves of fire up his neck.
“I need to see John.”
“Carson?” Teyla’s hand is in his; he doesn’t know when she’d taken it. “Carson, I believe it would be best if Rodney could see John and…. and reassure himself that he is well.”
“Oh, very well. A few minutes only, Rodney - you need to be resting more, and the drug isn’t wholly out of your system yet.”
Rodney shudders and tries not to remember the first rush of the drug. Pretending it’s a nightmare helps, cloaks it in the unreality that dreams have in daylight, and it works, works as Teyla and Carson help him into a wheelchair and push him down the short hall to the isolation rooms, works up until the moment Carson opens the door and he sees the wires, the tattoos, and smells the blood.
* * *
He greets the morning of the fifth day by running.
The last of the drug blisters along his veins, impelling him on. He has, has to make it back to the city today, otherwise he’s done for. Yesterday - yesterday… Rodney has to fumble to think over the hum of blood, the imperative back to the city, back back back and oh yeah, the river, so close he’d come and his shoulder still burns from it.
Run and run, burn of breath in his lungs, hot, muggy breath, trip, fall hard on hands and knees, get up get up get up and keep running. His world shapes itself to that, breath, speed, trying not to break the rhythm even when tree roots trip him up and send him sprawling. Sweat glues his shirt to his body, the fabric uncomfortable against his skin. His pouch and knife sheath bang on his hip; he has his knife in his hand.
For an hour he runs until he has to stop and drink. The canteen flavors the water with leather but he drinks half of it. The path is taking him back south and west to the city, upstream. The river murmurs and sighs somewhere beyond the trees.
Run. He straps the canteen over his shoulder, firms his grip on his knife.
_______
“Aren’t you hot?” John asks. Thanos stands over him, regarding him impassively. The room, small and square, lit with oil lamps, is uncomfortably close with warmth.
Thanos tugs at his high-collared jacket to pull it lower. Symbols march along his pale skin.
“Fuck.”
Thanos smiles and straightens his collar. He moves closer, bending over a little so the five priests holding John down have to struggle to keep John from going for the bastard’s throat.
“You have come for the Great Hunt,” Thanos tells him, pale lips lengthening in satisfaction. “You will have what is required.”
He nods to one of the other priests, one of the ones not occupied with holding John down, and John sees a slim-bladed knife in those long fingers, goes still as the priest cuts away the sleeve of his jacket, and freezes as another holds up a syringe.
In the faint glow from the lamps the liquid inside it glows amber.
“If the hunt is good,” Thanos is saying as the priest sets the needle to John’s vein, “one of you will die. The victor will be given to the God of Caves, and our people will prosper for another year.”
John can feel it though he tells himself he can't, the tingle of power, the rush insinuating itself in his blood, settling along his nerves like fire. With this you will feel no pain, one of the priests tells him, the words thrumming along with John's pulse, with this you will need little rest and less food, a gift for the five days of wilderness.
He tries to ignore the words, holds to a memory that, even as he reaches for it, slips through his fingers.
The two of them only this morning, Rodney still and asleep in the light off the face of the ocean.
* * *
He has marked five days in the circling of the sun, four of them with near-victory and all with hesitation.
Kill him, throbs through him, carried along by his pulse, the demand of the drug, the darker voices within him that have become familiar now. He knows, distantly, this wasn’t always so - that these voices had hidden themselves, had been strange to him, had been governed by need and necessity, unlike now when they carry him along like a rip current.
He stays the other’s shadow for a while, allowing the westward course for a while because this far out there’s no way even running all day they’ll make it back to the city. Wait and wait, he decides, store up the anticipation and then… blue eyes, the end, and he’ll be the last thing they see.
_______
"I suppose we could skip the part where I tell you it started out like a normal mission," Rodney says.
Elizabeth, tucked neatly into the chair Teyla had occupied yesterday--the other side of a long, nightmare-twisted sleep--nods and smiles. Her gentleness makes Rodney want to scream, or get up and pace, makes him want to climb out of his goddamn skin. The drug is mostly gone but he still feels like he'd felt as the last of the enzyme had drained away, distracted, frantic, his heart clawing its way out of his throat.
He doesn't want to talk, but Elizabeth by his side, Carson at the foot of his bed, Teyla and Ronon, have him corralled and helpless. Every now and then Ronon’s eyes flick toward the Wraith markings on Rodney’s neck and face.
"They let Teyla and Ronon go because they didn't have the ATA gene," he says, and that knowledge had only come with the first tentative touches of clarity. “It’s a… a relic, I guess, from when the Wraith first started, um, persuading people to worship them.”
“By capturing Ancients?” Elizabeth asks.
“Do I look like an anthropologist?” He wants to be back with John, with John who won’t look at him, who’s still recovering and still clawing at the tattoos on his neck. His own neck hurts from Carson’s laser treatment, splotched unpleasantly red. “According to Thanos, they’ve been doing this nonstop for the better part of ten thousand years… Just not always with Ancients.”
He has to pick apart nightmares for them, reaching back through blood and fear and the drug’s insanity for the memory of Thanos’s cold words: the weaker hunter killed during the hunt itself, the stronger being sacrificed to the Wraith. The reward was what that Wraith had done to Sheppard that one time, the re-giving of life, to a sick or dying citizen.
“The fountain of youth,” Elizabeth murmurs, which requires an explanation for Teyla and Ronon.
“We had always dismissed stories of a substance capable of restoring youth and vigor as… ridiculous,” Teyla says after a moment.
“What else, Rodney?” Elizabeth’s leaning forward a bit, pressing the issue.
“You don’t need to know that,” Rodney says. Because she doesn’t. What happened out there had been… He doesn’t know yet. “We were both a bit crazy.”
Her gaze flicks over his shoulder, the bandage on his arm, the injection site, the cast on his (as it turns out) broken ankle, and yeah, she might need to know but Rodney doesn’t want her to. What happened out there had been him and John, or some twisted version of the two of them.
John’s breath on his shoulder, his knife at Rodney’s throat, and out of the corner of his eye Rodney can see the intent ferocity on John’s face, almost enthralled by the weak reflection of light off the blade, anticipation and hunger, and then his mouth is where only breath had been, sharp teeth, and then…
“Can I see John again?” he asks.
* * *
The morning brightens to noon, the sunlight almost poisonous when it pierces the canopy. The north bank has less cover; he’ll need to cross again. He thinks these things distantly, not the processes of logic he knows he’s good at, but a deeper voice than that. Survive and get back home. In the sweat-stung haze of his flight he remembers what home is, only impressions now, but the dominant one is of safety.
Safe, with cool breezes, not this evil, stagnant air. Safe, quiet, two arms around him -
He sees movement, shadows in shadows, in the undergrowth off the path and he has enough time to brace himself before his own shadow comes for him. Twist, dodge, his ankle buckling but the drug shores him up, moves him past the pain and keeps him upright even as his balance threatens to go. His shadow turns on him, torn dark clothing and mad green eyes, markings climbing his face, knife in his hand with Rodney’s dried blood on it.
Rodney has some of his blood on his own knife. The thought kicks savagely through him.
It’s enough to banish fear, enough to make him brave, to forget that he’s the one who’s been running - that in some other world he would have been the one to run, of necessity - and it’s enough to make him angry, a still kind of anger that has him dropping to a crouch, waiting for his shadow to move first.
They’ve come to a clearing on the bank, enough room to maneuver. Even as Rodney thinks this, a grin twists his shadow’s mouth.
Death’s face in the mirror, soft with condensation on the glass, mouth careful on Rodney’s shoulder.
It doesn’t quite pull him from concentration, but what does is a sudden skitter of awareness, of something - a voice, a presence - that isn’t him, or his shadow, the forest, the drug.
Death pauses and looks up.
* * *
“Radek modified one of the life-signs detectors to track down ATA carriers,” he says to John’s quiet self. He hates this immobility, John lying quiescent under his blankets; though John is very often still, energy always runs underneath it. “They’d been doing cloaked sweeps for three days.”
John stares dully at the bandage on Rodney’s arm, the bright red trace left from Carson’s laser treatments. One hand lifts absently and Rodney tenses before he can stop himself.
_______
At last, at last they’ve come to it, he can’t wait, sense-memory from the past four days sharp and stinging and spurring him on, memory of that sweat, that body, eyes bright blue with fear and defiance, the taste of blood, the feel of it imprinted in his flesh. He moves through the trees, noisy and sloppy he knows, but he also knows he’s won.
Cornered and the other knows it, the river no escape this time.
Cornered or not, he turns, mouth thin with determination and knife-hand absolutely steady, and this is better. All of him surges with anticipation, yes yes yes this is better than what he’d imagined, what he’d seen their path leading to for the past four days. A contest at last instead of hide-and-seek, strength and strength, and even though he’ll win this it’s the gesture, the final struggle that counts.
A soft presence, a breeze in the still air, comes to him. He shakes it off, concentrates on the dirty, bloody man in front of him, the bite mark on one side of his neck, semi-circles impressed into dark ink.
Stronger, not a breeze, a familiar voice though unheard, bright and smooth across his cortex. He looks up to where the voice is coming from and sees it, a thing that hides grace under its ungainly form, silhouetted against the sun.
Puddle jumper, he thinks, the name that goes with this floating thing.
And another name, to go with determined blue eyes and the scent he’s chased for days now.
Rodney.
* * *
He sees Rodney’s flinch and withdraws, would leave if goddamn fucking Beckett didn’t have him half tied down to keep him from scratching at the tattoos.
I want them the hell off, he’d said to Beckett, along with a few other things.
In a few days, had been Carson’s answer. The wound on his chest had become infected and needed to finish draining, and Carson wasn’t going to mutilate him even more before he’d recovered from everything else that had been done to him.
That I did to myself, we did to each other. There’s probably a visit or ten with Heightmeyer in his future - it’s probably only the residual effects of the drug that have kept her away for now. He’s got his answers, that it was the drug, the fucking Wraith worshippers, no of course I’m okay with my other self being a homicidal maniac. Who wouldn’t be?
Rodney’s watching him silently, which unnerves him. Rodney’s supposed to move, and say, and do. His eyes wear deep shadows, though, and his neck… John keeps staring at it. The laser treatment has erased most of the tattoo, but it lingers there still, a shadow.
Wraith property. He shudders and swallows harshly against the thought, tries to figure out which is worse, being owned by the Wraith or feeling like being possessed by one.
“Ronon wants to go back and blow them all to hell,” Rodney offers after a moment. “I told him he’ll have to wait until we’re back on our feet.”
John smiles as best he can, which isn’t very good at all.
_______
When Rodney looks at John’s hands, which wear bruises and scrapes and broken nails, he wonders if, when they touch him next, they’ll bring him pleasure or pain. His body doesn’t know, reaching out and withdrawing at the same time, and he doesn’t know if memory will fade with the scars or if it will stay fresh, sharp in its strange, hazy way.
The five days in the forest blur into sensation, not sight - endless trees that blend into one another - but scent, touch, an awareness of his body that makes him shiver when he thinks about it. Knowing what it’s like to have all of John pressed against his back, the layers of their sweaty clothes rough between them, and John himself like steel against his spine… And yeah, he wants that too, because next to that he feels slow, dulled, sensation coming through a filter.
More feeling: pain that the drug couldn’t quite mask, fear, flashes of fierce joy when he’d turned on John - death, the shadow - and thought I could kill him.
That terrifies him enough that he says I’ll see you later to John and leaves as fast as he can, John’s gaze following him out the door.
_______
John watches Rodney leave, a flurry of blue bathrobe and agitation, and sighs. He’s told himself not to be surprised at this reaction, at Rodney leaving, but still it digs in, mean and sharp and deep, and twists like a knife.
He listens to the nurse moving around, adjusting machines and tubes. The sounds still prick at him, the same way Rodney does, too immediate and real to deal with.
Rodney. His memory fumbles over confused moments, flickers of action from the chase, Rodney pressed immobile to his chest, the taste of his blood, Rodney here and alive, and looking at him.
Alive counts for a lot in John’s book, enough that it makes turning away from the still-open door a little easier.
_______
Carson releases Rodney to his quarters two days after Lorne, Teyla, and Ronon pick them up out of the jungle, and that’s too soon and not soon enough. Not soon enough because Rodney’s lost research time, which is one of the capital sins in his estimation of the world, but too soon because he doesn’t like knowing John’s still in isolation, having nightmares, and him being unable to hear the soft, half-muffled noises John makes in his sleep.
“Get out of here, Rodney,” Carson says firmly, and banishes him from the infirmary.
He wanders back through Atlantis’s corridors, touching the walls, staring at the glass fountains, the clarity of unfiltered sun. A few people stop to greet him and Radek says something about the ZPM, and normally that would be enough to get him down to the labs, but suddenly all Rodney wants is to go back to his room.
His quarters are the same way he’d left them the morning of the mission: the bed in disarray, the covers kicked to the floor, one of John’s Sudoku books fallen off the nightstand. Rodney stares at the book for a moment and doesn’t know whether to fling it out the nearest window or put it back, or drop it off in John’s office for when he gets out.
In the end, he sets the book on top of the alarm clock.
He brushes his teeth to get rid of the infirmary aftertaste, stares at himself in the mirror.
John behind him, his sleep-rough morning, Rodney turned to a kiss on his shoulder.
The thin cut from John’s knife marks where John’s mouth had been that morning. Rodney touches it hesitantly, fingers walking over the thin line.
We almost killed each other. For two men who have made a habit of mutual death threats and then saving each other’s life, the possibility comes as sharp as one of their knives. And it’s not the possibility of being killed by John that upsets him, it’s the fact that they didn’t do it, that despite being not themselves, John had hesitated and Rodney had run every time.
Rodney rinses, spits, wipes a hand across his mouth and looks at himself in the mirror. His reflection looks back, a pale-skinned, wounded stranger who’d somehow ended up in Rodney’s bathroom.
_______
After another day, their third day back and John’s second day back among the living, the drug loosens the last of its hold on him, leaving him dull, normal, which relieves him. It’s not so hard forget what he can do now, to gloss over or retranslate the voices that whisper to him of killing and the ease of it. In its wake, though, it leaves memory - rough, uncertain memory, with some moments painfully clear and the others a blur of little more than hunt and find.
Rodney’s absence digs at him. Teyla, sitting next to him, seems to sense this and smiles. Mercifully, she doesn’t offer the standard excuses - that Rodney’s busy or caught up in something, or completely oblivious as to hospital etiquette regarding visiting the people you’re sleeping with.
“I will be here with you, if you wish,” she tells him instead, and runs one hand over his.
He withdraws from the touch, and her smile turns sad.
“Are you ready to begin, Colonel?” Carson asks. He has the laser equipment set up, the last treatment John has to endure before escaping.
“Since two days ago,” John says. The tattoos scratch at him, seep into him, a reminder that he once almost had been owned by the Wraith. Most of that time he can’t remember, because there hadn’t been a him to remember anything. He wonders if Carson’s laser can cut deep enough, or if he can burn away memory along with ink.
“Wait!”
Rodney’s voice beats him through the door by a nanosecond; the rest of him follows, a whirlwind of bad t-shirt and khakis and impatience and fear. Normal and John’s heart constricts, and he goes back to the last clear memory before all of this, the one last thing he has of them that isn’t poisoned by the drug, marked by the Wraith.
The two of them that morning, Rodney still and asleep in the light off the face of the ocean.
Teyla can’t quite hide her relieved sigh. She stands and inclines her head to Rodney, who doesn’t know what to do with the gesture other than glare at Carson and ask if they can be left alone for a minute.
“Rodney!” Carson snaps.
“I’m sitting with him,” Rodney says, case closed, and before Carson or John can object, he stations himself next to John’s bed.
He bends close, and the hell with Carson, the nurses, anyone watching, Rodney’s breath smells like mint, and he smells like detergent and himself, only new cuts and bruises to mark him as different. One of those beat-up hands wraps itself around one of John’s, flawed skin and flawed skin together, and holds on tight.
“I remember a bit of what happened,” Rodney says to him, voice low, the voice John thinks maybe no one else has heard. “Every time you could have killed me, you didn’t.”
John tries to look away but finds he can’t, is held trapped by the unexpected seriousness in Rodney’s eyes, empty of the usual condescension Rodney adopts when having to explain things. But he remembers too, and much of what he remembers is anticipation, a cocktail of adrenaline and arousal.
“I wanted to keep going,” he tells Rodney, because that’s true, and Rodney deserves to hear it. “That last time, I was going to kill you.”
“Like I would have let you,” Rodney scoffs, belligerent and familiar and there’s the condescension, as reassuring as Rodney’s hand in his, his sturdy body bent over John’s. “You almost did, I almost did, but we didn’t.”
“McKay.” If Rodney’s not going to turn it into a guilt trip, John can’t let him turn it into… Into what? The truth?
Threaded through the chase, the blood, the want, he can remember the hesitation, the flicker of something other than wanting to drag out that adrenaline-laced thrill: a morning, sunlight, Rodney’s face limned in it.
You reacted more strongly to the drug than Rodney, Carson had said when John had been lucid enough to understand him, possibly because of your gene, possibly because of your training.
Not because of yourself, Carson had meant, and John hadn’t believed him. Rodney, in his own rough way, offers him the same argument, but coming from him, John finds he can, maybe, believe it.
“We almost killed each other,” Rodney whispers. Fearless, unflinching, his thumb traces distracted infinity symbols across John’s knuckles.
“Yeah.”
“And we didn’t,” Rodney continues, and his mouth is on John’s battered hand, and when John clumsily shapes his fingers to the line of Rodney’s jaw, Rodney smiles.
**
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Author: aesc ( interview)
Team: Angst
Prompt: Strategy
Pairing(s): McKay/Sheppard
Rating: hard R
Warnings: violence, sex
Summary: A five-day hunt.
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**
IN A DARK WOOD
When they come, they come at odd moments, flickering but piercing sharp and deep like arrows.
A heavy, familiar body twists over him, down, into him, hands fierce on Rodney's hips and breath hot on his neck. Always, always this hunger the night before.
The images hover at the left side of memory; they have the quality of unreality, that they could not have happened - not when all he knows is the endless cathedral of forest, the terror tight around his throat - but still. Something in him refuses to believe they’re mere imagination.
John's mouth on his, tasting of salt and heady like wine, then teeth on his neck to scrape over delicate skin and he almost cries out but strangles it back, arching up against the assertion of John's body, wants to beg, to say please God let me come but the closeness of the night, of John, demands silence.
John. Important that name, for so many reasons, but he isn’t sure at the moment what they are, other than that the name attaches itself to those almost-memories, to safety and to home.
Home. He carefully pushes thoughts of that place aside and turns back to his current struggle.
He can't open his goddamn pack, the rawhide strings knotted shut, and tired of clawing at them and starved beyond all reason, he takes his knife and cuts them. He doesn't look at the dried blood on the blade when he does, but is careful to place the knife back in the sheath at his thigh.
The pouch holds a few pieces of bread, meat, some kind of fruit he doesn't know, sharp-smelling in a way that sets off alarm bells deep in his brain. Dangerous to try this, they say, but he's starving and ignores them and takes a bite. Instinctively he braces for the evaporation of breath, the deadly clench in his chest, and he should have... have something to break the worst of the reaction, but he doesn't and the reaction never comes.
He spits a seed out and wipes his mouth, and the back of his hand is filthy with sweat and dirt, but he's gone past caring. He eats everything, even the core, and licks his fingers. The copper of dried blood cuts the bitterness, the heaviness of alien soil, the hovering sweetness of the fruit.
Got to move again because he will be here soon, as he always is, this tracking, shadowing presence over Rodney's shoulder. Three times already he's been caught and three times almost been killed, and on the last try the difference between death and escape had been that, for the first time, Rodney had been willing to use his knife.
The second… He touches the bite mark at his neck, remembering lips on his skin and hot, fierce breath.
Laughter in his mouth, John teasing him because he can, slow, lazy strokes that take Rodney nowhere except frustration while John's fingers sketch him out, reducing him to the line of his collarbone, his back a wave that curves in answer to John's thrusts, plane of chest and the soft curve of belly to which John presses one callus-rough hand.
He shudders away from the thought and re-knots the pouch strings, checks the knife. The hilt is tacky under his hand, the wrapped leather still moist. The pouch and the knife are leather and metal, natural things against which his clothes are awkward, dark synthetic greys that don't belong.
The forest wraps him in its humid breath, heavy enough that carrying it is carrying weight, pressing sweat out of him. He's refilled his canteen six times, is almost on empty now but hesitates at finding his way to the stream to get more, because he'll be waiting there, knowing Rodney will eventually, somewhere, have to make his way down to the river to drink.
A faint animal path wends through the underbrush, but he'd lost the human-made road the first night out, when it had either fallen out from under him or he'd stumbled off it into the tangle of trees with their strangling vines and their roots that trip him. The only path he has is the river, a muted voice he's terrified to lose.
Thirst claws at him, his canteen perilously light after the sip he allows himself. Can't keep this up, he thinks again, and it's not a new thought.
At least Teyla and Ronon escaped. He pauses at the names and wonders over them.
Teyla and Ronon... Faces, both with dark eyes, one with a kind smile, the other framed by thick and ill-disciplined hair. They're gone, away, which is a good thing, he thinks distantly. Help. A word connected with those faces, those names: help, rescue, safety, home, that word again. He doesn't know, though, what happened to John. The last he'd seen--
Almost cruelly John twists into him, hips harsh against Rodney's thighs, fingers ringing his waist with bruises. Heat and heat, the two of them, and like breath they curl around one another.
The memory cuts off as he stumbles down the riverbank, pausing behind a glossy-leaved bush. No other sound but the river's green, endless murmuring, the brief agitation when it crosses over boulders downstream. The water he cups in his palms is muddied, mixed with chlorophyll and probably a million microbes, a miracle that he hasn't died of dysentery already.
The syringe waits in his pouch; he stares at his hands a moment longer then takes a deep, frantic gulp. Splash again, another mouthful and another, a few handfuls devoted to washing his arms. The water cleans away the dirt and reveals the scratches festering underneath, a deep gouge raking across one arm, and he looks at it a moment, trying to remember how he got it. It almost overlays another scar, this one older, white and thin, and looking at it he remembers wind and rain.
After drinking as much as he dares, he refills his canteen and caps it tightly. Two refills back he'd forgotten to do that, chased away from the river by something huge with teeth, and it had been miles before he'd found a way back to the river again.
That had been the third time he'd almost died, but he'd slipped on a slick of wet leaves and the knife raised to take him through the heart had missed.
Oh God. He tenses, listening, but there's only the river and his anxious breath. Something moves again on the far bank and he retreats into the undergrowth again, waits almost forever until a small deerlike thing creeps out and begins to drink.
A minute, that's what he needs, a minute--make it an hour, or a day, a night to get his head together. Thought comes, slow and clumsy with exhaustion and tripped up by the drug, but he has to move; he can't stay, although all he wants to do is sleep, bruises and cuts and all, the need for it running in a subliminal message under the metallic assertion of the drug. Sickness hovers deep in his stomach, held at bay by the evil-looking solution in the syringe in his pouch.
Out of everything he has, he guards this the most closely.
The drug holds back other things. He knows, knows he shouldn't have lived this long, should have died ten minutes out of the city, but he’s still alive, still running. And as for running, he can run faster, farther, the swollen right ankle should have him immobilized but it only slows him when he has to fix the rags and shoelace that brace it. There is a weakness in him that says these fruits, the dried meat and bread in his pouch shouldn't be enough to keep him functioning, but it's a muted whisper.
Think, because in the place connected with Teyla and Ronon and John, he’s the thinker, the smart one. He listens some more, there at the edge of the river, to the water and the birdcalls, the trilling insects that suddenly fall silent.
In his quarters it's warm, the air holding close the scent of the two of them, John sharp and rich with sweat and come, soap from the shower after his workout. Rodney tries to pull the sheet over them but John stops him and instead half-covers him, sleek, long-draped muscle, rolling them both into another kiss.
* * *
Softness cradles his head, his back, and light waits on the other side of his eyelids, unfiltered by a canopy of leaves.
Voices, friends' voices. Teyla. Ronon.
He listens for John.
* * *
The attack comes from his left, the side he always forgets about. Silent, dark, a shadow from shadows, the blade dulled with dirt and blood.
Rodney tries to twist away, only half-manages it; the knife misses his heart, slices through his shirt to ground itself in the mud. He slips, the mud organic and elusive under him, no help at all that the other man can't find purchase on it either. The knife blade scrapes his shoulder; he reaches to grab it, but a powerful hand locks around his wrist and pushes down, down so his forearm's pressed against his neck and oh God, he's going to die, he can feel his airway collapsing, blackness coming at the corner of his vision and his breath and terrified heart are the only things he can hear.
The pressure lifts a moment, death hesitating, and Rodney sees, haloed by specks of shadow, death's face, drawing back, caught in doubt.
He pushes hard, the last of his drug-fueled strength, and breaks free.
The knife lies on it side; he can grab it, maybe, and kill his hunter, leave him there on the bank for the river predators and the birds to eat. I can do it, he thinks and the drug transmutes terror into exultation, into power, as he stares wide-eyed at the hunter underneath him.
Kill, whispers an old voice in his blood, a voice the drug's unlocked and brought up from where civilization's buried it.
But he can’t, he can’t.
Instead he runs, to the river, to safety. The floor of the river drops off sharply, one step between tripping over slimy rocks and sudden swimming, and he claws at the water to pull himself up and across.
He makes it, choking and staggering, to the far bank and pulls himself up on a mud slick. His ankle throbs and his breath comes rough through a trachea that's probably been bruised. Over his shoulder he sees his shadow on the far bank, standing there and watching.
* * *
"Rodney?" A gentle, familiar voice, connected to dark eyes and a smile that is also gentle and familiar. "Rodney, please open your eyes."
He does, is surprised by the harsh artificial brightness and not the organic half-light of the jungle. Clean lines, metal, synthetics everywhere; only the woman in front of him is flesh and blood. The fading drug lets him pick up the faintest hint of her scent, warm and clean.
"Teyla," he says, the name that belongs to that voice and those eyes.
She smiles and nods. "Yes, Rodney. It is good to see you awake." Her hand is gentle on his shoulder, the one with the knife cut in it. He can feel the minor accent of pain, the irregularity of a new scar. "Can I get you anything?"
"Water," he whispers, and the cup she hands him is clear, the water clean and cold down his throat. She takes it from him before he can drink too much.
"Carson will be in soon," she tells him, moving gracefully to sit in the chair parked next to his bed, "but I asked him to leave us alone while we talk."
"Talk?" His mind fumbles away from her words, on a tangent marked by tangled vines and shadows, oppressive heat, fear. The hunter, four days being followed by him, four times almost dying and escaping barely each time. "You... you came," he mutters, holding on to that. "You got us out."
Teyla's mouth tightens and her gaze, usually so strong, slips to the side in evasion.
Another name comes to him.
John.
* * *
The fourth night he spends in a hollow under a long-dead tree, a rough cave carved out by roots and the course of an ancient flood. The syringe, three-quarters empty now, lies next to him. His clothes dry to his skin, chilling him even though the air is heavy with heat.
He'd thought about traveling during the night, but he can't navigate through the canopy. The only orientation he has is the river, which runs west to east, and the only goal he has is the stargate back near the city, but the hunter keeps him from it, herding him northeast.
Stargate. The word attaches itself to a gigantic circular frame, marked with signs and symbols. A thing for going places, for movement across worlds. A pattern of interconnected stars lays itself against the dark and transforms itself to home.
Home: a place of constant light, of a vault of stars. Water endlessly moving, the busy murmur of it always there in the back of his mind, not the slow course of the river behind him.
Home: a room, pictures on the wall, looking at himself in one of those pictures, looking at himself in a glass, perpetually startled blue eyes, sleep-disordered hair, then another face appearing over his shoulder with lazy green eyes and unruly dark hair, chin stubble-rough when its owner brushes it across Rodney's shoulder and bends to kiss bare skin.
The hunter's face.
Rodney jerks awake.
* * *
“Where’s John?” he asks.
Teyla’s hand goes tight on his
Carson comes in at that moment. A friend, Rodney remembers, whose face belongs with the beeping machines and quiet efficiency.
“How are you, Rodney?” he asks. He steps close to look at something over Rodney’s shoulder. Rodney inhales sharply, a noseful of antiseptic and latex that speaks more to his memory of Carson than anything else, and makes Carson real again.
“I…” He tries to look at what Carson’s doing, but his back throbs when he tries to move and the skin along the right side of his neck burns as though dusted with hot ash.
“Where’s John?”
_______
He pulls his shirt off and inspects the rust-red stain marking it before setting it aside. Skin rises pink and delicate around the gash, a little beneath his right nipple and raking through muscle, not infected yet and so unimportant. A soft smile touches his lips as he cleans the wound, sweet shiver of pain up his side when he presses pus from it and stretches to put on his shirt again.
That had been a surprise, the best kind of exhilaration.
The first time had been too easy, so he’d let him go, barely one day into the hunt.
He’d run, a terrified, straight line down the cattle track into the forest, and when the track had faded he’d plowed his own, crashing through vines and bracken and leaving a path clear as day to where he’d hidden in a cave.
It had been a matter of waiting, a shadow in shadows, for him to come out after deciding it must be safe, that danger had passed him by or had given up and left, but time dilates under the pressure of fear - and he was afraid. Stupid-afraid, and when he’d come out of the cave - a shiver races along him, thinking of the closeness, his own unaccountable hesitation.
Knife sinking into the flesh of one arm - he’d stopped, feeling the solid body freezing against him, a shiver into frightened stillness.
Let him go. He’d stepped back, stepped back from a certain kill, and the other had run away.
The blood from the wound on the other’s arm stained his own skin, tinted his tongue with copper warmth when he’d licked it off.
Other chances, five days of them, and though they’re on the fourth now, they can have more if he can elude the hunters who hunt him so they can play this forever.
Five days echoes through his bones. Five days to stalk, like child's play, chasing something this soft, but games are fun. Sixty men, so effortless, killing - the effort is in the chase, the invention. Distantly, he wonders what he'll do at the end of it, with blood-warmed hands and flesh cooling underneath him, if that will be the end or if there will be more, or if the game will be enough.
The second he’d taken him in shadow at the edge of night, flawless how he'd come through the darkness, a heartbeat between standing at the edge of the clearing and pressing himself to that strong, greyclad back, his knife to that throat, a hand on a wide forehead to pull it back so tendons and arteries strain against the angle.
Contours of muscle all along his chest, his belly, his thighs, and the scant light silvered frightened eyes and they were frozen like that, and when he dragged in a breath he dragged in scent and paralyzing memory--another closeness, another darkness, and he breathed into that warm ear words he couldn’t hear anymore but could feel.
It had been to throw him off, and a sharp elbow took him in the ribs--two of them buckled and he folded around the sudden flare of pain that the drug had snuffed out--but the shock of near-memory had kept him still long enough for his prey to vanish into the forest.
The third time had given him this wound, when the ground had suddenly fallen out from underneath them and the strike that had been meant for the heart had gone wide.
Off-balance, but even as he’d thought that and tried to right himself, steel flashed in the other’s hand and then -
A heavy weight on him that makes his heart kick in fierce response, not fear but excitement that made him grin even as the world blurred, narrowed to the knife coming closer, closer, and then in, a line of fire across his chest. Finally, finally, this was what the game was, this moment, the two of them tangled together and that solid, desperate, clumsy weight on top of him, flailing, fighting, and in another heartbeat he could turn, roll them, take that knife -
Then - then nothing. An absence of pressure, a moment to realize the hot stickiness of his own blood, and the other disappeared into the shadows.
He holds off for most of the fourth day, pressing northeast. The geography is alien to him, useless, with only the river giving direction. The other one, desperate and predictable, wants to return to the city, to safety and shelter, and along with the sweet hum of anticipation, the vision of that last attack, warm flesh under his hands, pressed into the earth, skin quivering under his breath, he knows they can't go back that way.
Not for the safety, but for some other reason that has to do with freedom from walls and those severe, pale faces and more than that, the two of them.
They. Paired, the two of them.
In the endless walk he pauses a few times for water, once for the fruit and a bite of the meat in his pouch, but they go stale next to the memory of the sharp sweat-scent in the hollow of the other man's neck, the promise of flesh close beneath his lips. Only the drug is sweeter, sharper, when he injects his daily ration of it, but even that fades when he thinks of biting that neck, the give of skin, the soft, paralyzed cry.
And he wants that again, the helplessness before dying. The need quivers in him,
He remembers this from years ago, the wicked thrill of pursuit. He remembers sixty of them dying, his fingers pressed to cool metal. The circumstances flicker on the edge of memory and vanish, unimportant - the sensation matters, the race of it up and down his spine, dark and fierce in his blood.
I do this, he thinks. This is his life, shaped to the pace of his prey--his terrified, staggering prey.
Different once, is a distant reminder, that once the hunt had been driven by necessity, the need to save, to bring out alive others more important than himself. It's a qualification easily dismissed; the drug runs roughshod over it.
A deep breath brings the scents of the forest to him, the thickness of growing things, the rot underfoot, and the sounds come too: birdcall, insects, the uneven footsteps he's chased for a day now. Wildlife has made a rough path near the river, with occasional beachheads near watering holes and the mud slicks where crocodiles sun themselves; at the edge of the path are broken twigs, and a large frond bent back where something large and clumsy had passed through.
He follows the track down to the river, stealing silently through the brush, knife like a talon in his hand.
Waiting for him there in a patch of sunlight: that familiar greyclad back, kneeling by the bank to scoop up water.
His foot slips on the mud--better traction without the boots but something in him tells him he needs to keep them on--and he crashes into the one he's followed, the breath exploding from his lungs. Desperate arch of the body under him, unexpected strength that knocks off his aim and the killing blow goes wide, takes him in the shoulder instead, bright flowering of blood against pale skin.
They roll clumsily for a moment, the quarry making the foolish attempt to go for the knife and he has him now, oh yes, fuck fuck fuck yes, and he jams that forearm against a protesting throat, presses and presses down and down.
Then: his eyes, oh God his eyes, wide and blue and sightless.
_______
“Where the hell is he?” his voice breaks around the dryness in his throat, and around fear.
“He’s resting,” Teyla says, glancing at Carson before looking back at Rodney. She wears confidence so well, but Rodney finds it hard to believe her. “You should rest as well, Rodney.”
“Not until I know where he is.” Exhaustion, the fading drug, clouds his memory.
John’s face in the mirror, morning-soft smile, the kiss on his shoulder - the left shoulder that wears a scar from John’s knife.
That wild face over him, green eyes glassy with predatory distance, pressing pressing down into him, fighting for air and failing -
“I’ve had him put in isolation.” Carson sighs, the put-upon sigh he uses whenever Rodney is being especially difficult. Given his situation, Rodney feels he’s well within his rights to be as difficult as he wants. “Not that you recall it, but the symptoms associated with enzyme withdrawal aren’t particularly pleasant.”
Rodney glances down at his right arm and there it is, a square of gauze taped over the injection site. It throbs with mean, tight pain, a burn that finds an echo along his right shoulder and neck. He touches them automatically, but there’s nothing there that he can feel.
“There is more,” Teyla says reluctantly, and nods at Carson.
Carson’s mouth thins, but he picks up a mirror from a tray of surgical implements and gives it to Rodney, who takes it and holds it up with a shaking hand.
* * *
The Marnae are a secretive people, cloistered away on their jungle world, but Pegasus legend has it that they are skilled at plant lore--"Primitive botanists," John says, and Rodney says, "Like there's any other kind"--and that the extracts they obtain from their plants are good for anything from analgesics to aphrodisiacs. Wilder legends say they possess the means to restore lost youth, but Teyla, whose father and grandfather have traded with them, dismisses the stories.
Thanos, tall and pale-skinned, youthful-looking under the tattoos of green and black, is the one who greets them and arranges for Teyla to speak with the master brewer, a fair-haired woman with fluttery hands and a quick, clipped way speaking. He's the one who leads Rodney and John through the stone-paved square, past the sculptures that line the center of it, up the serpent-carved steps of the temple.
He's the one who places them in a room in the temple and says their companions will be sent home, that the hunt will begin the following moon.
He's the one who walks away quietly, neat in his dark linen robes, while John curses him and shouts for him to come back, and when he does come back brings matching pouches, a pair of knives, canteens, and the rules of the hunt.
When he leaves again he takes John with him, leaving Rodney to the dark and the fierce hands of the Marnae priests, who push him onto a table. He struggles, bucking against them, shouting Fucking let me go, shouting for John, for anyone, but one of them has a powerful arm across his shoulders and is leaning down to hiss in his ear.
“If you wish no further pain, be still, hunter.”
He freezes, not from the fear of pain but because these guys are fucking strong and he isn’t going anywhere with five of them on top of him. One of the priests laughs, and in the anxious lamplight John sees a bowl of something, thick needles laid out next to it.
* * *
Wraith markings. Wraith writing, the symbols that designate the members of a particular Hive, and their property.
“We were - we were…” No.
“You should rest,” Teyla says. She takes the mirror from him. When he closes his eyes, he can see the black lines spidering up his neck to his cheekbone, can feel the ghost-touch of the priest who’d pushed his head to one side, exposing his neck and immobilizing him. Fear slices effortlessly through the fog of the drug. Now that he remembers he can feel the needles pressing the ink into his skin, the pattern twisting its dark way in angles and curves of fire up his neck.
“I need to see John.”
“Carson?” Teyla’s hand is in his; he doesn’t know when she’d taken it. “Carson, I believe it would be best if Rodney could see John and…. and reassure himself that he is well.”
“Oh, very well. A few minutes only, Rodney - you need to be resting more, and the drug isn’t wholly out of your system yet.”
Rodney shudders and tries not to remember the first rush of the drug. Pretending it’s a nightmare helps, cloaks it in the unreality that dreams have in daylight, and it works, works as Teyla and Carson help him into a wheelchair and push him down the short hall to the isolation rooms, works up until the moment Carson opens the door and he sees the wires, the tattoos, and smells the blood.
* * *
He greets the morning of the fifth day by running.
The last of the drug blisters along his veins, impelling him on. He has, has to make it back to the city today, otherwise he’s done for. Yesterday - yesterday… Rodney has to fumble to think over the hum of blood, the imperative back to the city, back back back and oh yeah, the river, so close he’d come and his shoulder still burns from it.
Run and run, burn of breath in his lungs, hot, muggy breath, trip, fall hard on hands and knees, get up get up get up and keep running. His world shapes itself to that, breath, speed, trying not to break the rhythm even when tree roots trip him up and send him sprawling. Sweat glues his shirt to his body, the fabric uncomfortable against his skin. His pouch and knife sheath bang on his hip; he has his knife in his hand.
For an hour he runs until he has to stop and drink. The canteen flavors the water with leather but he drinks half of it. The path is taking him back south and west to the city, upstream. The river murmurs and sighs somewhere beyond the trees.
Run. He straps the canteen over his shoulder, firms his grip on his knife.
_______
“Aren’t you hot?” John asks. Thanos stands over him, regarding him impassively. The room, small and square, lit with oil lamps, is uncomfortably close with warmth.
Thanos tugs at his high-collared jacket to pull it lower. Symbols march along his pale skin.
“Fuck.”
Thanos smiles and straightens his collar. He moves closer, bending over a little so the five priests holding John down have to struggle to keep John from going for the bastard’s throat.
“You have come for the Great Hunt,” Thanos tells him, pale lips lengthening in satisfaction. “You will have what is required.”
He nods to one of the other priests, one of the ones not occupied with holding John down, and John sees a slim-bladed knife in those long fingers, goes still as the priest cuts away the sleeve of his jacket, and freezes as another holds up a syringe.
In the faint glow from the lamps the liquid inside it glows amber.
“If the hunt is good,” Thanos is saying as the priest sets the needle to John’s vein, “one of you will die. The victor will be given to the God of Caves, and our people will prosper for another year.”
John can feel it though he tells himself he can't, the tingle of power, the rush insinuating itself in his blood, settling along his nerves like fire. With this you will feel no pain, one of the priests tells him, the words thrumming along with John's pulse, with this you will need little rest and less food, a gift for the five days of wilderness.
He tries to ignore the words, holds to a memory that, even as he reaches for it, slips through his fingers.
The two of them only this morning, Rodney still and asleep in the light off the face of the ocean.
* * *
He has marked five days in the circling of the sun, four of them with near-victory and all with hesitation.
Kill him, throbs through him, carried along by his pulse, the demand of the drug, the darker voices within him that have become familiar now. He knows, distantly, this wasn’t always so - that these voices had hidden themselves, had been strange to him, had been governed by need and necessity, unlike now when they carry him along like a rip current.
He stays the other’s shadow for a while, allowing the westward course for a while because this far out there’s no way even running all day they’ll make it back to the city. Wait and wait, he decides, store up the anticipation and then… blue eyes, the end, and he’ll be the last thing they see.
_______
"I suppose we could skip the part where I tell you it started out like a normal mission," Rodney says.
Elizabeth, tucked neatly into the chair Teyla had occupied yesterday--the other side of a long, nightmare-twisted sleep--nods and smiles. Her gentleness makes Rodney want to scream, or get up and pace, makes him want to climb out of his goddamn skin. The drug is mostly gone but he still feels like he'd felt as the last of the enzyme had drained away, distracted, frantic, his heart clawing its way out of his throat.
He doesn't want to talk, but Elizabeth by his side, Carson at the foot of his bed, Teyla and Ronon, have him corralled and helpless. Every now and then Ronon’s eyes flick toward the Wraith markings on Rodney’s neck and face.
"They let Teyla and Ronon go because they didn't have the ATA gene," he says, and that knowledge had only come with the first tentative touches of clarity. “It’s a… a relic, I guess, from when the Wraith first started, um, persuading people to worship them.”
“By capturing Ancients?” Elizabeth asks.
“Do I look like an anthropologist?” He wants to be back with John, with John who won’t look at him, who’s still recovering and still clawing at the tattoos on his neck. His own neck hurts from Carson’s laser treatment, splotched unpleasantly red. “According to Thanos, they’ve been doing this nonstop for the better part of ten thousand years… Just not always with Ancients.”
He has to pick apart nightmares for them, reaching back through blood and fear and the drug’s insanity for the memory of Thanos’s cold words: the weaker hunter killed during the hunt itself, the stronger being sacrificed to the Wraith. The reward was what that Wraith had done to Sheppard that one time, the re-giving of life, to a sick or dying citizen.
“The fountain of youth,” Elizabeth murmurs, which requires an explanation for Teyla and Ronon.
“We had always dismissed stories of a substance capable of restoring youth and vigor as… ridiculous,” Teyla says after a moment.
“What else, Rodney?” Elizabeth’s leaning forward a bit, pressing the issue.
“You don’t need to know that,” Rodney says. Because she doesn’t. What happened out there had been… He doesn’t know yet. “We were both a bit crazy.”
Her gaze flicks over his shoulder, the bandage on his arm, the injection site, the cast on his (as it turns out) broken ankle, and yeah, she might need to know but Rodney doesn’t want her to. What happened out there had been him and John, or some twisted version of the two of them.
John’s breath on his shoulder, his knife at Rodney’s throat, and out of the corner of his eye Rodney can see the intent ferocity on John’s face, almost enthralled by the weak reflection of light off the blade, anticipation and hunger, and then his mouth is where only breath had been, sharp teeth, and then…
“Can I see John again?” he asks.
* * *
The morning brightens to noon, the sunlight almost poisonous when it pierces the canopy. The north bank has less cover; he’ll need to cross again. He thinks these things distantly, not the processes of logic he knows he’s good at, but a deeper voice than that. Survive and get back home. In the sweat-stung haze of his flight he remembers what home is, only impressions now, but the dominant one is of safety.
Safe, with cool breezes, not this evil, stagnant air. Safe, quiet, two arms around him -
He sees movement, shadows in shadows, in the undergrowth off the path and he has enough time to brace himself before his own shadow comes for him. Twist, dodge, his ankle buckling but the drug shores him up, moves him past the pain and keeps him upright even as his balance threatens to go. His shadow turns on him, torn dark clothing and mad green eyes, markings climbing his face, knife in his hand with Rodney’s dried blood on it.
Rodney has some of his blood on his own knife. The thought kicks savagely through him.
It’s enough to banish fear, enough to make him brave, to forget that he’s the one who’s been running - that in some other world he would have been the one to run, of necessity - and it’s enough to make him angry, a still kind of anger that has him dropping to a crouch, waiting for his shadow to move first.
They’ve come to a clearing on the bank, enough room to maneuver. Even as Rodney thinks this, a grin twists his shadow’s mouth.
Death’s face in the mirror, soft with condensation on the glass, mouth careful on Rodney’s shoulder.
It doesn’t quite pull him from concentration, but what does is a sudden skitter of awareness, of something - a voice, a presence - that isn’t him, or his shadow, the forest, the drug.
Death pauses and looks up.
* * *
“Radek modified one of the life-signs detectors to track down ATA carriers,” he says to John’s quiet self. He hates this immobility, John lying quiescent under his blankets; though John is very often still, energy always runs underneath it. “They’d been doing cloaked sweeps for three days.”
John stares dully at the bandage on Rodney’s arm, the bright red trace left from Carson’s laser treatments. One hand lifts absently and Rodney tenses before he can stop himself.
_______
At last, at last they’ve come to it, he can’t wait, sense-memory from the past four days sharp and stinging and spurring him on, memory of that sweat, that body, eyes bright blue with fear and defiance, the taste of blood, the feel of it imprinted in his flesh. He moves through the trees, noisy and sloppy he knows, but he also knows he’s won.
Cornered and the other knows it, the river no escape this time.
Cornered or not, he turns, mouth thin with determination and knife-hand absolutely steady, and this is better. All of him surges with anticipation, yes yes yes this is better than what he’d imagined, what he’d seen their path leading to for the past four days. A contest at last instead of hide-and-seek, strength and strength, and even though he’ll win this it’s the gesture, the final struggle that counts.
A soft presence, a breeze in the still air, comes to him. He shakes it off, concentrates on the dirty, bloody man in front of him, the bite mark on one side of his neck, semi-circles impressed into dark ink.
Stronger, not a breeze, a familiar voice though unheard, bright and smooth across his cortex. He looks up to where the voice is coming from and sees it, a thing that hides grace under its ungainly form, silhouetted against the sun.
Puddle jumper, he thinks, the name that goes with this floating thing.
And another name, to go with determined blue eyes and the scent he’s chased for days now.
Rodney.
* * *
He sees Rodney’s flinch and withdraws, would leave if goddamn fucking Beckett didn’t have him half tied down to keep him from scratching at the tattoos.
I want them the hell off, he’d said to Beckett, along with a few other things.
In a few days, had been Carson’s answer. The wound on his chest had become infected and needed to finish draining, and Carson wasn’t going to mutilate him even more before he’d recovered from everything else that had been done to him.
That I did to myself, we did to each other. There’s probably a visit or ten with Heightmeyer in his future - it’s probably only the residual effects of the drug that have kept her away for now. He’s got his answers, that it was the drug, the fucking Wraith worshippers, no of course I’m okay with my other self being a homicidal maniac. Who wouldn’t be?
Rodney’s watching him silently, which unnerves him. Rodney’s supposed to move, and say, and do. His eyes wear deep shadows, though, and his neck… John keeps staring at it. The laser treatment has erased most of the tattoo, but it lingers there still, a shadow.
Wraith property. He shudders and swallows harshly against the thought, tries to figure out which is worse, being owned by the Wraith or feeling like being possessed by one.
“Ronon wants to go back and blow them all to hell,” Rodney offers after a moment. “I told him he’ll have to wait until we’re back on our feet.”
John smiles as best he can, which isn’t very good at all.
_______
When Rodney looks at John’s hands, which wear bruises and scrapes and broken nails, he wonders if, when they touch him next, they’ll bring him pleasure or pain. His body doesn’t know, reaching out and withdrawing at the same time, and he doesn’t know if memory will fade with the scars or if it will stay fresh, sharp in its strange, hazy way.
The five days in the forest blur into sensation, not sight - endless trees that blend into one another - but scent, touch, an awareness of his body that makes him shiver when he thinks about it. Knowing what it’s like to have all of John pressed against his back, the layers of their sweaty clothes rough between them, and John himself like steel against his spine… And yeah, he wants that too, because next to that he feels slow, dulled, sensation coming through a filter.
More feeling: pain that the drug couldn’t quite mask, fear, flashes of fierce joy when he’d turned on John - death, the shadow - and thought I could kill him.
That terrifies him enough that he says I’ll see you later to John and leaves as fast as he can, John’s gaze following him out the door.
_______
John watches Rodney leave, a flurry of blue bathrobe and agitation, and sighs. He’s told himself not to be surprised at this reaction, at Rodney leaving, but still it digs in, mean and sharp and deep, and twists like a knife.
He listens to the nurse moving around, adjusting machines and tubes. The sounds still prick at him, the same way Rodney does, too immediate and real to deal with.
Rodney. His memory fumbles over confused moments, flickers of action from the chase, Rodney pressed immobile to his chest, the taste of his blood, Rodney here and alive, and looking at him.
Alive counts for a lot in John’s book, enough that it makes turning away from the still-open door a little easier.
_______
Carson releases Rodney to his quarters two days after Lorne, Teyla, and Ronon pick them up out of the jungle, and that’s too soon and not soon enough. Not soon enough because Rodney’s lost research time, which is one of the capital sins in his estimation of the world, but too soon because he doesn’t like knowing John’s still in isolation, having nightmares, and him being unable to hear the soft, half-muffled noises John makes in his sleep.
“Get out of here, Rodney,” Carson says firmly, and banishes him from the infirmary.
He wanders back through Atlantis’s corridors, touching the walls, staring at the glass fountains, the clarity of unfiltered sun. A few people stop to greet him and Radek says something about the ZPM, and normally that would be enough to get him down to the labs, but suddenly all Rodney wants is to go back to his room.
His quarters are the same way he’d left them the morning of the mission: the bed in disarray, the covers kicked to the floor, one of John’s Sudoku books fallen off the nightstand. Rodney stares at the book for a moment and doesn’t know whether to fling it out the nearest window or put it back, or drop it off in John’s office for when he gets out.
In the end, he sets the book on top of the alarm clock.
He brushes his teeth to get rid of the infirmary aftertaste, stares at himself in the mirror.
John behind him, his sleep-rough morning, Rodney turned to a kiss on his shoulder.
The thin cut from John’s knife marks where John’s mouth had been that morning. Rodney touches it hesitantly, fingers walking over the thin line.
We almost killed each other. For two men who have made a habit of mutual death threats and then saving each other’s life, the possibility comes as sharp as one of their knives. And it’s not the possibility of being killed by John that upsets him, it’s the fact that they didn’t do it, that despite being not themselves, John had hesitated and Rodney had run every time.
Rodney rinses, spits, wipes a hand across his mouth and looks at himself in the mirror. His reflection looks back, a pale-skinned, wounded stranger who’d somehow ended up in Rodney’s bathroom.
_______
After another day, their third day back and John’s second day back among the living, the drug loosens the last of its hold on him, leaving him dull, normal, which relieves him. It’s not so hard forget what he can do now, to gloss over or retranslate the voices that whisper to him of killing and the ease of it. In its wake, though, it leaves memory - rough, uncertain memory, with some moments painfully clear and the others a blur of little more than hunt and find.
Rodney’s absence digs at him. Teyla, sitting next to him, seems to sense this and smiles. Mercifully, she doesn’t offer the standard excuses - that Rodney’s busy or caught up in something, or completely oblivious as to hospital etiquette regarding visiting the people you’re sleeping with.
“I will be here with you, if you wish,” she tells him instead, and runs one hand over his.
He withdraws from the touch, and her smile turns sad.
“Are you ready to begin, Colonel?” Carson asks. He has the laser equipment set up, the last treatment John has to endure before escaping.
“Since two days ago,” John says. The tattoos scratch at him, seep into him, a reminder that he once almost had been owned by the Wraith. Most of that time he can’t remember, because there hadn’t been a him to remember anything. He wonders if Carson’s laser can cut deep enough, or if he can burn away memory along with ink.
“Wait!”
Rodney’s voice beats him through the door by a nanosecond; the rest of him follows, a whirlwind of bad t-shirt and khakis and impatience and fear. Normal and John’s heart constricts, and he goes back to the last clear memory before all of this, the one last thing he has of them that isn’t poisoned by the drug, marked by the Wraith.
The two of them that morning, Rodney still and asleep in the light off the face of the ocean.
Teyla can’t quite hide her relieved sigh. She stands and inclines her head to Rodney, who doesn’t know what to do with the gesture other than glare at Carson and ask if they can be left alone for a minute.
“Rodney!” Carson snaps.
“I’m sitting with him,” Rodney says, case closed, and before Carson or John can object, he stations himself next to John’s bed.
He bends close, and the hell with Carson, the nurses, anyone watching, Rodney’s breath smells like mint, and he smells like detergent and himself, only new cuts and bruises to mark him as different. One of those beat-up hands wraps itself around one of John’s, flawed skin and flawed skin together, and holds on tight.
“I remember a bit of what happened,” Rodney says to him, voice low, the voice John thinks maybe no one else has heard. “Every time you could have killed me, you didn’t.”
John tries to look away but finds he can’t, is held trapped by the unexpected seriousness in Rodney’s eyes, empty of the usual condescension Rodney adopts when having to explain things. But he remembers too, and much of what he remembers is anticipation, a cocktail of adrenaline and arousal.
“I wanted to keep going,” he tells Rodney, because that’s true, and Rodney deserves to hear it. “That last time, I was going to kill you.”
“Like I would have let you,” Rodney scoffs, belligerent and familiar and there’s the condescension, as reassuring as Rodney’s hand in his, his sturdy body bent over John’s. “You almost did, I almost did, but we didn’t.”
“McKay.” If Rodney’s not going to turn it into a guilt trip, John can’t let him turn it into… Into what? The truth?
Threaded through the chase, the blood, the want, he can remember the hesitation, the flicker of something other than wanting to drag out that adrenaline-laced thrill: a morning, sunlight, Rodney’s face limned in it.
You reacted more strongly to the drug than Rodney, Carson had said when John had been lucid enough to understand him, possibly because of your gene, possibly because of your training.
Not because of yourself, Carson had meant, and John hadn’t believed him. Rodney, in his own rough way, offers him the same argument, but coming from him, John finds he can, maybe, believe it.
“We almost killed each other,” Rodney whispers. Fearless, unflinching, his thumb traces distracted infinity symbols across John’s knuckles.
“Yeah.”
“And we didn’t,” Rodney continues, and his mouth is on John’s battered hand, and when John clumsily shapes his fingers to the line of Rodney’s jaw, Rodney smiles.
**
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