TEAM WAR: Down to Earth, "Like Gravity (It Doesn't Matter If You Believe In It)"
Title: Like Gravity (It Doesn't Matter If You Believe In It)
Author: pogrebin
Team: War
Prompt: Down to Earth
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard (minor McKay/Keller, Sheppard/Vala)
Rating: R
Warnings: Spoilers up to Season 10 of SG-1
Summary: What’s left after the war is over; a series of snapshots in a life.
Notes: With thanks to James Goss’s ‘Almost Perfect’, which I was reading as I wrote this. The format and style are certainly somewhat influenced.
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.
**
‘a list’ by J. Sheppard
1) Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
2) McKay’s personality
3) CANADIAN.
‘Reasons Sheppard and me are never going to have sex, no way, no chance, so help me eventual heat death of the universe so stop thinking about it already’ by Dr. Rodney McKay PhD PhD
1) The idiotic US military
2) Sheppard is clearly a self-hating fag
3) Idiotic hair
4) Unclear evidence of brain under said idiotic hair
5) Might murder me for calling him a ‘trophy wife’
6) Tendency towards showy self-sacrificing heroic gestures
nothing like genocide to get you in the mood
They kiss as the hive ships explode on the monitors and up in the sky like stars in a universe fast-forwarding to its death. Every single Wraith travelling or hibernating on a Hive Ship is wiped out in a matter of seconds, and over the next six months the people of the Pegasus Galaxy make short work of the few Wraith that were stranded planetside. (The next time they run into the Travellers they have Wraithskin hangings pinned to the walls of the corridors.)
John flinches when Rodney babbles, “Oh god, I think this might be even less classy than hitting on someone at a funeral.”
That night, in Rodney’s arms, John dreams of the spaces where the arms of galaxies spray into each other, the collision of asteroids, of looking deep into Rodney’s throat and seeing a spinning field of stellar debris. Humanity has taken to the stars, and it has left garbage in its wake. He dreams of spitting dark-matter out of the window of his car and driving through cosmic rays, feeling the surfaces of pulsars with his fingers and finding chewing gum under the crust.
He wakes up gasping and looks at the man in his arms, soft and smoothened by sleep. He wonders whether they exchanged dreams: whether Rodney is seeing dead bodies in the desert, whether he’ll wake up blinded by the flash of a 20 kiloton nuclear explosion viewed through the curved window of a fighter jet. They are a strange pair of heroes, a stranger pair of murderers. John’s pretty sure they’ll pin a medal on him for it.
recall (total and otherwise)
The two year plan for a scaling down of operations in the Pegasus Galaxy is sent through a databurst from the SGC before the corpses even have time to cool. Woolsey blinks furiously through the meeting and keeps his eyes trained on the datapad in front of him, mouth full of bureaucratese and technospeak. Rodney sees it for what it is: a defense, a cloak, underneath them he seems small and unsure. Woolsey’s a good man, but-- but-- oh, it’s unfair to compare him to Elizabeth, but Rodney can’t help doing it anyway-- there’s no drama to him. Under pressure he withdraws where Elizabeth would have unfurled, burned like a banner or pennant, keeping her uncertainty locked deep within her body. (It’s only after their battles were fought that Rodney saw her exhaustion and fear, and it made him respect her all the more.)
John’s right foot taps an unsteady rhythm underneath Woolsey’s words, one that only Rodney can hear because he’s sat next to him at the conference table. Teyla keeps her face diplomatically blank, darting quick glances at Ronon whenever his hands tense on the table. In the momentary silence between one page turning and the next it’s like Rodney can see to the hearts of them, see the bonds between them pulled tight like molecules bound together. No. Like planets pulled towards and away from each other through gravity. Yes, he can understand their relationships as celestial motion.
Later, he tries to explain this to them. “Distance means nothing. Gravity gets weaker but it still exerts a pull.”
Teyla smiles at him but John’s face remains impassive. “I’m going for a run,” he says shortly, with a nod to Ronon, who follows him out of the room with a shrug.
She looks after them with a thoughtful expression before setting her shoulders. “Give him some time. John is-- not good with change.”
“I know,” he snaps, with a bit more force than necessary, but Teyla’s face, when she turns to him, is more resigned than irritated.
“I know you do, Rodney,” she says, and slips her arm into his. Rodney’s slightly embarrassed by the warmth that courses through him at the gesture.
hiatus
They don’t see or speak to each other for a year, almost to the day.
The relevant facts are these:
-John gets his transfer papers six months after the first communiqué
-Rodney is offered a permanent position, in furtherance of the IOA and SGCs joint goal of refashioning Atlantis as an outpost for scientific exploration in the Pegasus Galaxy
As a consequence, John replays their last conversation in his head so many times that he’s not entirely sure he didn’t invent it entirely. In his mind, he sees both of them in a fixed tableau, like they’re marionettes spotlighted on a stage. He’s an audience-member rather than a participant.
The text of their dialogue, he can reproduce to the letter:
Rodney: You’re being kind of an asshole.
John: Yep.
[long pause]
Rodney: Sheppard, just ask me. If you want to tell them to fuck themselves and their orders, then--
John: Let’s try not to get court-martialled for treason here, McKay.
Rodney: So what?
John: They’re orders.
Rodney: Like that makes a difference to you. Would you like me to enumerate the occasions on which you’ve-
John: Thanks, but no.
Rodney: That’s it?
John: Looks like it.
Rodney: Just talk to me, John. Why can’t you just talk to me?
John: This is me, talking.
Rodney: I don’t know what you want from me.
John: I don’t want anything from you.
[long pause]
Rodney: Okay. Okay then. Fine, John.
Then Rodney walks away, an in John’s head he’s walking through a long and white-lit corridor, the light so bright it makes an inhuman, flickering shape of him even as he turns.
rupert murdoch is out to get you
Declassification is a badly organised semi-debacle that consists of, in almost equal part, interminable Senate hearings about unsupervised budgets and an endless wave of official press conferences that ineffectually attempt to control the media frenzy surrounding the gigantic government conspiracy, the “secret heroes” of the Stargate program and the notion of a populated universe beyond the wildest hope of SETI tinhats the world over.
Some idiotic Marine or gateroom tech tells the press about the rift between himself and Sheppard, and so General Landry calls them both in separately and reads them the riot act. “You will get along,” Landry says to him, with deliberate precision. “You will appear to get along in front of the American press. You will speak of each other as exemplary comrades-in-arms. You are not only heroes but representatives of Earth to the wider Galaxy, and as such you will be--,” here he pauses and leans forward behind his desk. “Irreproachable. Do we understand each other, Dr. McKay?”
“Does gas expand to fill all available space?” Rodney replies, with a sigh.
Landry narrows his eyes. “I would like to hear the words, Doctor.”
“I understand you, General.”
“We’re giving you the grateful thanks of a nation-- a planet. The respect of the scientific community. Hell, you’ll probably get a Nobel off the ZPM research alone, not to mention the countless applications of your other scientific discoveries. You and Sam Carter are going to be up there with Einstein and Newton and in return--,”
He interrupts, “In return you want my blood.”
“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that. But it’s not a bad deal, Dr. McKay.”
Rodney reads that as what it is: a dismissal. But as he’s leaving, he can’t help but tell Landry, “John isn’t going to be bought, you know.”
“Colonel Sheppard understands duty to his country,” is all Landry says to that, and Rodney has no answer.
truth in advertising
When they’re standing together at their third press conference, hemmed in by Teyla and Ronon, faking friendship, they suddenly find that the charade is actually not a charade at all. They’ve missed each other. They are both incapable of expressing it.
Instead, John says, “I need a drink. You coming, McKay?”
And Rodney says, “Yeah.”
The four of them sit together in a dingy bar just round the corner from the Cheyenne Mountain complex, and the year of silence and messages passed obliquely through Teyla and Ronon slip into the past. They chink their glasses together and ignore the half-curious half-awed looks of the people in the bar.
down to earth
Rodney gives up his position in Atlantis and gets married to Jennifer on a beautiful Colorado morning in June, and John is his best man--
He gets drunk at the reception and goes home with a waitress.
wash your hands after
“I want you to know,” John slurs, when they run into each other in the men’s toilets when everyone else in on the dancefloor. “I really do wish you the best. Have a happy-- thing, you know…” He makes a strange polygonal shape with his hand gestures.
“Marriage?” Rodney supplies helpfully, with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, buddy. That thing.”
Rodney laughs. “Thanks John,” he nods, but when they clasp in a hug their lips brush clumsily against each other and Rodney pulls himself away with a start. “Uh, I’ll just be--,”
“Yep,” agrees John. “Go. We’re cool.”
“No,” he corrects automatically. “You’re cool. I’m fine.”
He doesn’t quite run out of the toilets, and he certainly doesn’t look back. He certainly does not see John leaning his hip against the marble counter, watching him go with a fixed expression on his face. He rounds a corner and Teyla grabs him with both arms and tugs him onto the dancefloor.
“I saw you crying earlier, during the vows,” he crows. “Some Warrior Princess!”
“This is a joyous day,” she agrees, eyes bright from happiness and too much champagne. “You will not embarrass me with your false accusations, Rodney.”
absence makes the heart grow (something)
As far as John can tell, Rodney and Jennifer’s separation is amicable. As amicable as these things can be. A damn sight more amicable than his own separation from Nancy, at any rate. Instead of going off to fight a war to avoid his ex, Rodney takes a Visiting Professorship at Oxford, teaching wormhole physics and Ancient technology to a generation of students who have elevated McKay to the status of a scientific folk-hero.
John stays with him for a month when he breaks his leg offworld, and has to recuperate. Physio is as frustrating in Colorado as it is in England-- he’s too far gone to think of the United States as his home. It’s all equally alien to him, but there’s something comforting about the way that Rodney ensconces himself in any place that he lives for more than a week. His Victorian terrace-house is strewn with papers and pizza-boxes and clothes, lived in and familiar.
“We’re really bad at this,” Rodney says abruptly, as they’re watching the Jeremy Kyle show on television on a Wednesday afternoon.
John shifts a bit. “Yeah, we kind of are.”
Then he screws up all his courage and will and kisses him with the taste of grease and pepperoni in both their mouths.
cohabitation (the many quirks thereof)
When they move in together, John is surprised to find himself surprised by how many things he didn’t know about Rodney. For instance: he medicates relentlessly. “You’re practically a junkie,” John says, as Rodney takes three pills from a red-topped bottle with his morning coffee. Jennifer makes a face and mutters about doctor-patient confidentiality when he asks her about it, but then she tells him that they’re all legally prescribed stimulants, with matching downers. John’s no stranger to stims, he carried a bottle of them in his jacket in Afghanistan and then Iraq but Rodney behaves like he’s on mission all the time. He pops a pill in his mouth as he heads out the door after a 3:45am call on the comms, and then takes a carefully measured dose of a depressant when he gets back in so that he’s up for the 9am status meeting. John takes it as a good sign that Jennifer sounds mildly exasperated rather than concerned.
“Seriously,” she tells him, with a smile. “You should have seen med school. Pop an amphetamine and study all night. Rodney’s got the good stuff though. Synthesized from a plant found in MX3L1’s star-system. It’s going to revolutionize the market when they finally release it to the civilian world.”
“Whatever you say, Doc,” he says blandly, and Jennifer pats his hand, a bit like a indulgent niece. “You take care now.”
(Other things that John is blindsided by: Rodney does not keep carbonated soft-drinks in the house because they’re bad for the teeth, he has a drawer full of Magic: The Gathering decks but not a single one of them is opened and he knows the lyrics to every single one of Jay-Z’s songs.)
you’re always bringing your friends over
Rodney stumbles home late after saving the Earth yet again-- and jeez, he is going to having words with Sam Carter about the incompetent idiots that she supposedly trained over at Area 51-- and opens the door as quietly as he possibly can. The house is dark, surprisingly dark, devoid even of the noise of the television or the radio. (It isn’t something that he would ever bring up but since they’ve come back John sleeps better with some sound in the house; the suburbs of Colorado don’t have floors that hum with life, and the thick sounds of a city filled with three hundred men and women that live and work in shifts.)
“John?” He calls, uncertainly. By the time he’s round the corner he’s got his 9 mil in his hands and is using the dim reflections of the windows to check the hallways. There’s a dull thump from the guest bedroom and the pounding of the blood in his ears almost masks the sound of a door opening.
“Could you not point a gun at me, McKay?” John drawls, poking his head out of the room.
Rodney exhales and lowers the gun. “Fuck. Sheppard.”
“Jumpy today, aren’t we?” He asks, but there’s something a bit shifty about his gaze.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
Rodney raises an eyebrow and John looks away guiltily, which cements his suspicions. He pushes past John and his objections and flings open the bedroom door to find Todd, hands bound to his sides by the ridiculous SGC-issue harness, sitting on the bed. He grimaces a smile. “Hello Doctor McKay,” he grinds out, as Rodney stands there with his mouth open.
He turns on his heel and slams the door behind him. “John Patrick Sheppard,” he yells, his voice irritatingly high-pitched as John winces and looks down at his shoes. “Why is there a Wraith in our spare bedroom?”
“He’s consulting for the SGC and uh, I kinda offered to get him off base. You know.”
Rodney raises his eyebrows and crosses his arms.
“He’s the last of his kind,” John explains, making faces as if Rodney’s pulling his teeth. “I think he’s kind of lonely.”
Rodney rolls his eyes. “I have got to stop letting you read my comic books,” he sighs.
the meaning of numbers
For an incredibly avoidant chronic emotional repressor, John brings up the Last War with considerable frequency. In point of fact, about once a year, around the time of the extinction. Rodney is fairly sure that John believes he is being extraordinarily subtle and unpredictable, but then, John has all the self-awareness of a goldfish with a brain injury. “We killed them all,” John says, with finality, after his third scotch.
Rodney agrees with a nod. “We did.”
John sets his glass down with a hard thump. “Doesn’t that bother you?” He looks past Rodney’s shoulder. “It should bother you, Rodney. You’re not a soldier.”
Instead of a) snorting b) laughing or c) enumerating the litany of his scars, including 2 stab-wounds, no less than 3 spear-piercings and 7 separate gunshots, one of which was inflicted by the Idiot Colonel himself Rodney limits himself to heaving a put-upon sigh, putting away the scotch-glass and ushering John up to bed where he proceeds to fall fast asleep.
Sometimes Rodney thinks John doesn’t quite get how Rodney’s brain works. It’s whirring all the time; he remembers facts and faces and chemical-structures and vectors like so much background noise. When Rodney sees a number like 834,129 he can almost see every single one of them, individuated and whole, a writhing mass of Wraith held in his brain. He knows exactly what the number means in a way that few other people in the world could. Numbers have not been a way for Rodney to hide since Atlantis, they don’t appear cool and clean in his head any more. Instead:
four is the number of his team (with maybe a half for Aiden Ford, who he never really got to know, to his lasting shame)
ten is the number of seconds that passed before he said goodbye to Brendan Gaul and turned back to see his brains splattered against the wall
thirty days is all it took for him to realise that the city of Atlantis would always be his home
Forty-six is how old he is: salt-and-pepper hair, an ever so slight paunch and fifteen years with John Sheppard in one way or another
One hundred and twelve is the number of people they lost in the first year
Two hundred and nineteen is the largest number of consecutive hours he’s stayed awake, pumped up on stimulants and fear and pulled down by responsibility
and so on.
physics is a mistress
John comes back home to a house that’s empty, pops a beer and singsongs, “Honey, I’m home,” while trying not to feel like a housewife. Albeit a housewife with an occasional dayjob that involves shooting people in the face with a P90, which is pretty satisfying now that he comes to think about it. Rodney comes home a couple hours later, still thrumming with work, buzzing with adrenaline that leaves him unfocused and muttering. He’s seeing numbers unknit themselves before his eyes, shoving dinner into his mouth and responding on autocue.
“Your sister’s visiting next weekend,” John reminds him. “Madison wants a tour of the SGC. You‘ll get to play hero of the Pegasus Galaxy.”
Rodney actually stops and beams at that before wrinkling his nose. “You’re mocking again,” he sighs. “Always with the mocking.”
John smiles and resists the urge to lean forward and ruffle his hair. He could say: I do think you’re a hero, Rodney-- but Rodney probably wouldn’t believe him. Instead he slices off an extra large portion of chocolate cake for him after dinner.
genderswitches are not funny
In between everything else, John spends about six months as a woman because he was stupid enough to touch a glowy orb offworld and Rodney doesn’t freak out. He does however, suggest getting married while John’s in a societally approved body and John upends his cereal bowl over Rodney’s head and leaves him dripping milk, encrusted with honey-gold flakes in their newly-tiled kitchen. “That actually went better than my last proposal,” Rodney says out loud, to no one in particular.
Compared to other weird stuff that’s happened to them, it’s not such a big deal really. That fact is quite possibly the most unsettling thing about the whole situation. Rodney is dimly aware that John is handling the changes with somewhat less aplomb, but his new femininity has not led to a greater propensity to verbalise his emotions, stereotypes aside. All things considered, Rodney decides that avoidance is probably a sensible choice.
John comes back home after a week-long offworld mission with his cock back in place, and the only thing he says about the entire interlude is, “So. Huh. That was weird.”
“Eh,” Rodney shrugs.
fairytales are for children
Once there was a Prince and his kingdom lit up under his touch. He did not wear ceremonial robes or a crown, and instead of courtiers he had friends. They toiled together against the enemies of his people, under the sun and through the rain. The Prince knew love and it knew him; it coiled knowingly into his heart, interweaving its tendrils with his arteries and muscles.
And then one day his kingdom was torn from him, and in the tearing he lost his heart. Not the entire muscle: it still was capable of pumping blood round his body and nourishing his vital organs but there was something diminished in its beating. It beat out of habit and not passion.
John looks at Rodney’s face and sees everything they have lost. He knows they are using each other to compensate. They are, each one, living with their hearts torn out. That is the fact of the matter.
“Sheppard, this is stupid, just-- this is so--,” Rodney gropes for words, but does not reach his hands out to him. “Where are you going to go?”
John smiles blankly. “Anywhere,” he says. “Does it matter?”
And Rodney is quiet. John knows it’s because Rodney understands: it doesn’t matter where, nowhere on Earth is home.
winning the battle and not the war
Well, Rodney thinks, when John moves out, it was never exactly going to be simple, was it?
Teyla and Ronon show up not two hours later, and their arrival is both comforting as well as not: despite his gratitude at their camaraderie, they both live in the Pegasus Galaxy and so their arrival indicates that John leaving him was not a spontaneous act. Not that he thought it was, anyway. But still.
Each of them offer comfort in their own ways. Ronon lets him use his blaster to shoot John’s collection of green-glass beer bottles, arranged in perfect rows to take down to the recycling centre ‘when I’ve got the time’, while Teyla keeps up a constant chatter about the Pegasus Galaxy and the Coalition so that Rodney doesn’t have to do more than snort or roll his eyes at appropriate points.
The papers, on the other hand, are not a comfort. They take to the domestic squabble with an enormous and entirely unsavoury relish, even more so than when they were outed for the first time. The tabloids run headline articles about the breakup, complete with telephoto shots of John loading cardboard boxes into the hired van and Rodney standing in the doorway looking a bit lost. Jeannie rings him up at 7am the next day, having clearly picked up the morning edition, and Rodney has to beg her to talk in whispers because his head is pounding with a hangover and he has two very gate-lagged aliens sleeping in his spare room.
sleeping with ghosts
John doesn’t exactly mean to end up sleeping with Vala but does anyway. She’s remarkable in so many ways that John actually feels a pang of guilt about how little it all means to him. A pang that she dissipates the next morning when she shrugs on her top and says, with a grin, “That was fun, John. But maybe we should try it without other people some time?”
She is, in this and other things, remarkably astute. Their bed was crowded with Rodney, with Daniel, heavy with their own individual guilts and desires.
Some time turns out to be never. For all Vala’s free-and-easy talk she never does entirely shake off Daniel, and John, well. John knows he’ll never shake off Rodney, just like he’ll never shake off Atlantis. He’s used to living with the ghost of a city; one man isn’t much more of a burden.
the friend of a friend is--
Cam Mitchell invites Rodney out for a drink, showing up outside Area 51 with his beat up truck and a big homegrown grin. Rodney is immediately suspicious and not particularly graceful about it, but Cam seems determined to persevere despite this. Two drinks in, Cam leans over the table and says, “Have you talked to Sheppard recently?”
Rodney swallows his beer too fast and gulps, “No. Not for a while.”
Cam makes a pained face. “Will you, already? It’s a damn shame to see a man moping around the base, McKay. It’s bad for morale.”
“Moping?” He asks, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“Moping,” Cam confirms. “Just put him out of his misery, willya?”
At that, Rodney laughs, and keeps laughing, despite Cam’s wary look.
emotional honesty
They get thrown together again when Rodney’s making a presentation about weapons-applications to some new discoveries they’ve been working on at Area 51. John finds himself alone with Rodney outside the conference room and blurts, “You know I love you,” with his eyes fixed on his shoes.
He feels rather than sees McKay’s hand on his arm. “I know, John,” he says softly. His breath is warm against John’s ear and all he needs to do is turn his head ever so slightly so that their lips align and then they’re kissing. So softly, like it’s their first kiss, like they don’t know each other at all, and maybe they are. Two men meeting with nothing but hope and no ruined aspirations burning in their bellies. In that moment it is possible to leave behind everything he knows and in that moment John feels weightless, like he’s in an uncontrolled dive in an F16 and there’s nothing to do but wait for the collision of metal and earth.
Rodney avoids his calls for months after.
running into your ex
He sees John in again in Geneva; he’s a civilian now, wearing beat-up jeans a shade too skinny for his age and a shirt rolled up to his sleeves. He’s standing on the steps to the Court with an easy grin for the cameras that makes it look like his face is all hard surfaces, teeth and dark eyes covered in reflective glass. The photographers and journalists turn as one seething mass when Rodney steps out of his car, and his bodyguards shove a few of them when they get too close. His lawyer’s grip tightens as she tugs him up the stairs, and Rodney can only spare one glance as they go past; under the sunglasses, it’s hard to tell whether John looks back.
justice not vengeance
John answers the questions about his role in the Last War with a blank expression, with his shoulders stiff at attention. It’s taken some time for the Terran legal system to catch up with the complexities of interplanetary relations, but they’ve taken to it with fervour. Every single report in the SGC archives is being scrutinised, and all their decisions called to question. For the most part, the International Court is just making a point: they are inclined to be lenient with the saviours and defenders of the Earth, but they want to set a precedent for oversight.
John has duty to keep his face impassive when they ask difficult questions but Rodney does not: his testimony, televised live, has earned him something of a cult following. John chuckles when the news on his shitty hotel TV finishes with a segment of ‘McKayisms’, and stays behind in the viewing gallery to watch Rodney testify in various states of apoplexy.
the good life
He asks John whether he’s happy and wishes he didn’t want the answer to be ‘no’. But John just inclines his head and gives him a measured nod. “I’m-- not bad.”
“Civilian life suits you,” Rodney says, quite carefully, for him.
John smiles. “Never thought I’d see the day either.”
They’re more than lovers, less than friends-- but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t still feel the tug of gravity, of two objects in space trying to pull each other into an orbit. “I wish--,” Rodney trails off and then clamps his jaw shut, unable in this case to find the appropriate words.
“Yeah,” John agrees into the silence, an arm slung companionably around him.
“We won the war,” Rodney says bitterly. “That should be enough.”
John waits a few moments before drawing in a breath. “Like I said, Rodney, you’re not a soldier.”
This time, Rodney doesn’t feel qualified to argue.
the end is where we start from
John’s always known what Rodney is: a genius. One in a generation. Long after they’re dead and gone people will still be using his math and benefiting from his discoveries and memorialising his name. Rodney McKay is not a man that has to fear history; he’s written himself into the cold and vast empty spaces of the universe, he makes it bend to his will. And most of the time he behaves like he knows this, but then, all of a sudden, he’ll look at John with big eyes and a lost expression and ask, “Does it ever get any better?”
But the thing is, it’s Rodney, and Rodney doesn’t want anything but the truth and so John sets his jaw and tells him, “No it doesn’t,” even though he’d rather lie. It would be so much easier on both of them if he could.
“Then what are we doing?”
“We’re soldiers,” John says, and means it.
Rodney does not meet his eyes. “In whose war?”
He laughs without any mirth. “I didn’t expect to live long enough to ask.”
Rodney laughs then too, and their laughter turns genuine. “We’re a pair of miserable old bastards,” he pronounces, and John can’t help but agree.
They have lived longer than they had any right to. Rodney might be a genius but they both understand: he might be able to rewrite history and the universe, but they can’t rewrite themselves. This much, they must live with.
When he looks at Rodney in the fluorescent light of the hotel room he does not see the spires of Atlantis gleaming ghostly in the distance-- he sees, for the first time, just a man, like himself.
“I’m sorry,” John mumbles, against Rodney’s hair, and Rodney asks, “For what, for what?” and to that John has no reply.
Poll
Author: pogrebin
Team: War
Prompt: Down to Earth
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard (minor McKay/Keller, Sheppard/Vala)
Rating: R
Warnings: Spoilers up to Season 10 of SG-1
Summary: What’s left after the war is over; a series of snapshots in a life.
Notes: With thanks to James Goss’s ‘Almost Perfect’, which I was reading as I wrote this. The format and style are certainly somewhat influenced.
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.
**
‘a list’ by J. Sheppard
1) Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
2) McKay’s personality
3) CANADIAN.
‘Reasons Sheppard and me are never going to have sex, no way, no chance, so help me eventual heat death of the universe so stop thinking about it already’ by Dr. Rodney McKay PhD PhD
1) The idiotic US military
2) Sheppard is clearly a self-hating fag
3) Idiotic hair
4) Unclear evidence of brain under said idiotic hair
5) Might murder me for calling him a ‘trophy wife’
6) Tendency towards showy self-sacrificing heroic gestures
nothing like genocide to get you in the mood
They kiss as the hive ships explode on the monitors and up in the sky like stars in a universe fast-forwarding to its death. Every single Wraith travelling or hibernating on a Hive Ship is wiped out in a matter of seconds, and over the next six months the people of the Pegasus Galaxy make short work of the few Wraith that were stranded planetside. (The next time they run into the Travellers they have Wraithskin hangings pinned to the walls of the corridors.)
John flinches when Rodney babbles, “Oh god, I think this might be even less classy than hitting on someone at a funeral.”
That night, in Rodney’s arms, John dreams of the spaces where the arms of galaxies spray into each other, the collision of asteroids, of looking deep into Rodney’s throat and seeing a spinning field of stellar debris. Humanity has taken to the stars, and it has left garbage in its wake. He dreams of spitting dark-matter out of the window of his car and driving through cosmic rays, feeling the surfaces of pulsars with his fingers and finding chewing gum under the crust.
He wakes up gasping and looks at the man in his arms, soft and smoothened by sleep. He wonders whether they exchanged dreams: whether Rodney is seeing dead bodies in the desert, whether he’ll wake up blinded by the flash of a 20 kiloton nuclear explosion viewed through the curved window of a fighter jet. They are a strange pair of heroes, a stranger pair of murderers. John’s pretty sure they’ll pin a medal on him for it.
recall (total and otherwise)
The two year plan for a scaling down of operations in the Pegasus Galaxy is sent through a databurst from the SGC before the corpses even have time to cool. Woolsey blinks furiously through the meeting and keeps his eyes trained on the datapad in front of him, mouth full of bureaucratese and technospeak. Rodney sees it for what it is: a defense, a cloak, underneath them he seems small and unsure. Woolsey’s a good man, but-- but-- oh, it’s unfair to compare him to Elizabeth, but Rodney can’t help doing it anyway-- there’s no drama to him. Under pressure he withdraws where Elizabeth would have unfurled, burned like a banner or pennant, keeping her uncertainty locked deep within her body. (It’s only after their battles were fought that Rodney saw her exhaustion and fear, and it made him respect her all the more.)
John’s right foot taps an unsteady rhythm underneath Woolsey’s words, one that only Rodney can hear because he’s sat next to him at the conference table. Teyla keeps her face diplomatically blank, darting quick glances at Ronon whenever his hands tense on the table. In the momentary silence between one page turning and the next it’s like Rodney can see to the hearts of them, see the bonds between them pulled tight like molecules bound together. No. Like planets pulled towards and away from each other through gravity. Yes, he can understand their relationships as celestial motion.
Later, he tries to explain this to them. “Distance means nothing. Gravity gets weaker but it still exerts a pull.”
Teyla smiles at him but John’s face remains impassive. “I’m going for a run,” he says shortly, with a nod to Ronon, who follows him out of the room with a shrug.
She looks after them with a thoughtful expression before setting her shoulders. “Give him some time. John is-- not good with change.”
“I know,” he snaps, with a bit more force than necessary, but Teyla’s face, when she turns to him, is more resigned than irritated.
“I know you do, Rodney,” she says, and slips her arm into his. Rodney’s slightly embarrassed by the warmth that courses through him at the gesture.
hiatus
They don’t see or speak to each other for a year, almost to the day.
The relevant facts are these:
-John gets his transfer papers six months after the first communiqué
-Rodney is offered a permanent position, in furtherance of the IOA and SGCs joint goal of refashioning Atlantis as an outpost for scientific exploration in the Pegasus Galaxy
As a consequence, John replays their last conversation in his head so many times that he’s not entirely sure he didn’t invent it entirely. In his mind, he sees both of them in a fixed tableau, like they’re marionettes spotlighted on a stage. He’s an audience-member rather than a participant.
The text of their dialogue, he can reproduce to the letter:
Rodney: You’re being kind of an asshole.
John: Yep.
[long pause]
Rodney: Sheppard, just ask me. If you want to tell them to fuck themselves and their orders, then--
John: Let’s try not to get court-martialled for treason here, McKay.
Rodney: So what?
John: They’re orders.
Rodney: Like that makes a difference to you. Would you like me to enumerate the occasions on which you’ve-
John: Thanks, but no.
Rodney: That’s it?
John: Looks like it.
Rodney: Just talk to me, John. Why can’t you just talk to me?
John: This is me, talking.
Rodney: I don’t know what you want from me.
John: I don’t want anything from you.
[long pause]
Rodney: Okay. Okay then. Fine, John.
Then Rodney walks away, an in John’s head he’s walking through a long and white-lit corridor, the light so bright it makes an inhuman, flickering shape of him even as he turns.
rupert murdoch is out to get you
Declassification is a badly organised semi-debacle that consists of, in almost equal part, interminable Senate hearings about unsupervised budgets and an endless wave of official press conferences that ineffectually attempt to control the media frenzy surrounding the gigantic government conspiracy, the “secret heroes” of the Stargate program and the notion of a populated universe beyond the wildest hope of SETI tinhats the world over.
Some idiotic Marine or gateroom tech tells the press about the rift between himself and Sheppard, and so General Landry calls them both in separately and reads them the riot act. “You will get along,” Landry says to him, with deliberate precision. “You will appear to get along in front of the American press. You will speak of each other as exemplary comrades-in-arms. You are not only heroes but representatives of Earth to the wider Galaxy, and as such you will be--,” here he pauses and leans forward behind his desk. “Irreproachable. Do we understand each other, Dr. McKay?”
“Does gas expand to fill all available space?” Rodney replies, with a sigh.
Landry narrows his eyes. “I would like to hear the words, Doctor.”
“I understand you, General.”
“We’re giving you the grateful thanks of a nation-- a planet. The respect of the scientific community. Hell, you’ll probably get a Nobel off the ZPM research alone, not to mention the countless applications of your other scientific discoveries. You and Sam Carter are going to be up there with Einstein and Newton and in return--,”
He interrupts, “In return you want my blood.”
“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that. But it’s not a bad deal, Dr. McKay.”
Rodney reads that as what it is: a dismissal. But as he’s leaving, he can’t help but tell Landry, “John isn’t going to be bought, you know.”
“Colonel Sheppard understands duty to his country,” is all Landry says to that, and Rodney has no answer.
truth in advertising
When they’re standing together at their third press conference, hemmed in by Teyla and Ronon, faking friendship, they suddenly find that the charade is actually not a charade at all. They’ve missed each other. They are both incapable of expressing it.
Instead, John says, “I need a drink. You coming, McKay?”
And Rodney says, “Yeah.”
The four of them sit together in a dingy bar just round the corner from the Cheyenne Mountain complex, and the year of silence and messages passed obliquely through Teyla and Ronon slip into the past. They chink their glasses together and ignore the half-curious half-awed looks of the people in the bar.
down to earth
Rodney gives up his position in Atlantis and gets married to Jennifer on a beautiful Colorado morning in June, and John is his best man--
He gets drunk at the reception and goes home with a waitress.
wash your hands after
“I want you to know,” John slurs, when they run into each other in the men’s toilets when everyone else in on the dancefloor. “I really do wish you the best. Have a happy-- thing, you know…” He makes a strange polygonal shape with his hand gestures.
“Marriage?” Rodney supplies helpfully, with a raised eyebrow.
“Yeah, buddy. That thing.”
Rodney laughs. “Thanks John,” he nods, but when they clasp in a hug their lips brush clumsily against each other and Rodney pulls himself away with a start. “Uh, I’ll just be--,”
“Yep,” agrees John. “Go. We’re cool.”
“No,” he corrects automatically. “You’re cool. I’m fine.”
He doesn’t quite run out of the toilets, and he certainly doesn’t look back. He certainly does not see John leaning his hip against the marble counter, watching him go with a fixed expression on his face. He rounds a corner and Teyla grabs him with both arms and tugs him onto the dancefloor.
“I saw you crying earlier, during the vows,” he crows. “Some Warrior Princess!”
“This is a joyous day,” she agrees, eyes bright from happiness and too much champagne. “You will not embarrass me with your false accusations, Rodney.”
absence makes the heart grow (something)
As far as John can tell, Rodney and Jennifer’s separation is amicable. As amicable as these things can be. A damn sight more amicable than his own separation from Nancy, at any rate. Instead of going off to fight a war to avoid his ex, Rodney takes a Visiting Professorship at Oxford, teaching wormhole physics and Ancient technology to a generation of students who have elevated McKay to the status of a scientific folk-hero.
John stays with him for a month when he breaks his leg offworld, and has to recuperate. Physio is as frustrating in Colorado as it is in England-- he’s too far gone to think of the United States as his home. It’s all equally alien to him, but there’s something comforting about the way that Rodney ensconces himself in any place that he lives for more than a week. His Victorian terrace-house is strewn with papers and pizza-boxes and clothes, lived in and familiar.
“We’re really bad at this,” Rodney says abruptly, as they’re watching the Jeremy Kyle show on television on a Wednesday afternoon.
John shifts a bit. “Yeah, we kind of are.”
Then he screws up all his courage and will and kisses him with the taste of grease and pepperoni in both their mouths.
cohabitation (the many quirks thereof)
When they move in together, John is surprised to find himself surprised by how many things he didn’t know about Rodney. For instance: he medicates relentlessly. “You’re practically a junkie,” John says, as Rodney takes three pills from a red-topped bottle with his morning coffee. Jennifer makes a face and mutters about doctor-patient confidentiality when he asks her about it, but then she tells him that they’re all legally prescribed stimulants, with matching downers. John’s no stranger to stims, he carried a bottle of them in his jacket in Afghanistan and then Iraq but Rodney behaves like he’s on mission all the time. He pops a pill in his mouth as he heads out the door after a 3:45am call on the comms, and then takes a carefully measured dose of a depressant when he gets back in so that he’s up for the 9am status meeting. John takes it as a good sign that Jennifer sounds mildly exasperated rather than concerned.
“Seriously,” she tells him, with a smile. “You should have seen med school. Pop an amphetamine and study all night. Rodney’s got the good stuff though. Synthesized from a plant found in MX3L1’s star-system. It’s going to revolutionize the market when they finally release it to the civilian world.”
“Whatever you say, Doc,” he says blandly, and Jennifer pats his hand, a bit like a indulgent niece. “You take care now.”
(Other things that John is blindsided by: Rodney does not keep carbonated soft-drinks in the house because they’re bad for the teeth, he has a drawer full of Magic: The Gathering decks but not a single one of them is opened and he knows the lyrics to every single one of Jay-Z’s songs.)
you’re always bringing your friends over
Rodney stumbles home late after saving the Earth yet again-- and jeez, he is going to having words with Sam Carter about the incompetent idiots that she supposedly trained over at Area 51-- and opens the door as quietly as he possibly can. The house is dark, surprisingly dark, devoid even of the noise of the television or the radio. (It isn’t something that he would ever bring up but since they’ve come back John sleeps better with some sound in the house; the suburbs of Colorado don’t have floors that hum with life, and the thick sounds of a city filled with three hundred men and women that live and work in shifts.)
“John?” He calls, uncertainly. By the time he’s round the corner he’s got his 9 mil in his hands and is using the dim reflections of the windows to check the hallways. There’s a dull thump from the guest bedroom and the pounding of the blood in his ears almost masks the sound of a door opening.
“Could you not point a gun at me, McKay?” John drawls, poking his head out of the room.
Rodney exhales and lowers the gun. “Fuck. Sheppard.”
“Jumpy today, aren’t we?” He asks, but there’s something a bit shifty about his gaze.
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
Rodney raises an eyebrow and John looks away guiltily, which cements his suspicions. He pushes past John and his objections and flings open the bedroom door to find Todd, hands bound to his sides by the ridiculous SGC-issue harness, sitting on the bed. He grimaces a smile. “Hello Doctor McKay,” he grinds out, as Rodney stands there with his mouth open.
He turns on his heel and slams the door behind him. “John Patrick Sheppard,” he yells, his voice irritatingly high-pitched as John winces and looks down at his shoes. “Why is there a Wraith in our spare bedroom?”
“He’s consulting for the SGC and uh, I kinda offered to get him off base. You know.”
Rodney raises his eyebrows and crosses his arms.
“He’s the last of his kind,” John explains, making faces as if Rodney’s pulling his teeth. “I think he’s kind of lonely.”
Rodney rolls his eyes. “I have got to stop letting you read my comic books,” he sighs.
the meaning of numbers
For an incredibly avoidant chronic emotional repressor, John brings up the Last War with considerable frequency. In point of fact, about once a year, around the time of the extinction. Rodney is fairly sure that John believes he is being extraordinarily subtle and unpredictable, but then, John has all the self-awareness of a goldfish with a brain injury. “We killed them all,” John says, with finality, after his third scotch.
Rodney agrees with a nod. “We did.”
John sets his glass down with a hard thump. “Doesn’t that bother you?” He looks past Rodney’s shoulder. “It should bother you, Rodney. You’re not a soldier.”
Instead of a) snorting b) laughing or c) enumerating the litany of his scars, including 2 stab-wounds, no less than 3 spear-piercings and 7 separate gunshots, one of which was inflicted by the Idiot Colonel himself Rodney limits himself to heaving a put-upon sigh, putting away the scotch-glass and ushering John up to bed where he proceeds to fall fast asleep.
Sometimes Rodney thinks John doesn’t quite get how Rodney’s brain works. It’s whirring all the time; he remembers facts and faces and chemical-structures and vectors like so much background noise. When Rodney sees a number like 834,129 he can almost see every single one of them, individuated and whole, a writhing mass of Wraith held in his brain. He knows exactly what the number means in a way that few other people in the world could. Numbers have not been a way for Rodney to hide since Atlantis, they don’t appear cool and clean in his head any more. Instead:
four is the number of his team (with maybe a half for Aiden Ford, who he never really got to know, to his lasting shame)
ten is the number of seconds that passed before he said goodbye to Brendan Gaul and turned back to see his brains splattered against the wall
thirty days is all it took for him to realise that the city of Atlantis would always be his home
Forty-six is how old he is: salt-and-pepper hair, an ever so slight paunch and fifteen years with John Sheppard in one way or another
One hundred and twelve is the number of people they lost in the first year
Two hundred and nineteen is the largest number of consecutive hours he’s stayed awake, pumped up on stimulants and fear and pulled down by responsibility
and so on.
physics is a mistress
John comes back home to a house that’s empty, pops a beer and singsongs, “Honey, I’m home,” while trying not to feel like a housewife. Albeit a housewife with an occasional dayjob that involves shooting people in the face with a P90, which is pretty satisfying now that he comes to think about it. Rodney comes home a couple hours later, still thrumming with work, buzzing with adrenaline that leaves him unfocused and muttering. He’s seeing numbers unknit themselves before his eyes, shoving dinner into his mouth and responding on autocue.
“Your sister’s visiting next weekend,” John reminds him. “Madison wants a tour of the SGC. You‘ll get to play hero of the Pegasus Galaxy.”
Rodney actually stops and beams at that before wrinkling his nose. “You’re mocking again,” he sighs. “Always with the mocking.”
John smiles and resists the urge to lean forward and ruffle his hair. He could say: I do think you’re a hero, Rodney-- but Rodney probably wouldn’t believe him. Instead he slices off an extra large portion of chocolate cake for him after dinner.
genderswitches are not funny
In between everything else, John spends about six months as a woman because he was stupid enough to touch a glowy orb offworld and Rodney doesn’t freak out. He does however, suggest getting married while John’s in a societally approved body and John upends his cereal bowl over Rodney’s head and leaves him dripping milk, encrusted with honey-gold flakes in their newly-tiled kitchen. “That actually went better than my last proposal,” Rodney says out loud, to no one in particular.
Compared to other weird stuff that’s happened to them, it’s not such a big deal really. That fact is quite possibly the most unsettling thing about the whole situation. Rodney is dimly aware that John is handling the changes with somewhat less aplomb, but his new femininity has not led to a greater propensity to verbalise his emotions, stereotypes aside. All things considered, Rodney decides that avoidance is probably a sensible choice.
John comes back home after a week-long offworld mission with his cock back in place, and the only thing he says about the entire interlude is, “So. Huh. That was weird.”
“Eh,” Rodney shrugs.
fairytales are for children
Once there was a Prince and his kingdom lit up under his touch. He did not wear ceremonial robes or a crown, and instead of courtiers he had friends. They toiled together against the enemies of his people, under the sun and through the rain. The Prince knew love and it knew him; it coiled knowingly into his heart, interweaving its tendrils with his arteries and muscles.
And then one day his kingdom was torn from him, and in the tearing he lost his heart. Not the entire muscle: it still was capable of pumping blood round his body and nourishing his vital organs but there was something diminished in its beating. It beat out of habit and not passion.
John looks at Rodney’s face and sees everything they have lost. He knows they are using each other to compensate. They are, each one, living with their hearts torn out. That is the fact of the matter.
“Sheppard, this is stupid, just-- this is so--,” Rodney gropes for words, but does not reach his hands out to him. “Where are you going to go?”
John smiles blankly. “Anywhere,” he says. “Does it matter?”
And Rodney is quiet. John knows it’s because Rodney understands: it doesn’t matter where, nowhere on Earth is home.
winning the battle and not the war
Well, Rodney thinks, when John moves out, it was never exactly going to be simple, was it?
Teyla and Ronon show up not two hours later, and their arrival is both comforting as well as not: despite his gratitude at their camaraderie, they both live in the Pegasus Galaxy and so their arrival indicates that John leaving him was not a spontaneous act. Not that he thought it was, anyway. But still.
Each of them offer comfort in their own ways. Ronon lets him use his blaster to shoot John’s collection of green-glass beer bottles, arranged in perfect rows to take down to the recycling centre ‘when I’ve got the time’, while Teyla keeps up a constant chatter about the Pegasus Galaxy and the Coalition so that Rodney doesn’t have to do more than snort or roll his eyes at appropriate points.
The papers, on the other hand, are not a comfort. They take to the domestic squabble with an enormous and entirely unsavoury relish, even more so than when they were outed for the first time. The tabloids run headline articles about the breakup, complete with telephoto shots of John loading cardboard boxes into the hired van and Rodney standing in the doorway looking a bit lost. Jeannie rings him up at 7am the next day, having clearly picked up the morning edition, and Rodney has to beg her to talk in whispers because his head is pounding with a hangover and he has two very gate-lagged aliens sleeping in his spare room.
sleeping with ghosts
John doesn’t exactly mean to end up sleeping with Vala but does anyway. She’s remarkable in so many ways that John actually feels a pang of guilt about how little it all means to him. A pang that she dissipates the next morning when she shrugs on her top and says, with a grin, “That was fun, John. But maybe we should try it without other people some time?”
She is, in this and other things, remarkably astute. Their bed was crowded with Rodney, with Daniel, heavy with their own individual guilts and desires.
Some time turns out to be never. For all Vala’s free-and-easy talk she never does entirely shake off Daniel, and John, well. John knows he’ll never shake off Rodney, just like he’ll never shake off Atlantis. He’s used to living with the ghost of a city; one man isn’t much more of a burden.
the friend of a friend is--
Cam Mitchell invites Rodney out for a drink, showing up outside Area 51 with his beat up truck and a big homegrown grin. Rodney is immediately suspicious and not particularly graceful about it, but Cam seems determined to persevere despite this. Two drinks in, Cam leans over the table and says, “Have you talked to Sheppard recently?”
Rodney swallows his beer too fast and gulps, “No. Not for a while.”
Cam makes a pained face. “Will you, already? It’s a damn shame to see a man moping around the base, McKay. It’s bad for morale.”
“Moping?” He asks, trying not to sound too hopeful.
“Moping,” Cam confirms. “Just put him out of his misery, willya?”
At that, Rodney laughs, and keeps laughing, despite Cam’s wary look.
emotional honesty
They get thrown together again when Rodney’s making a presentation about weapons-applications to some new discoveries they’ve been working on at Area 51. John finds himself alone with Rodney outside the conference room and blurts, “You know I love you,” with his eyes fixed on his shoes.
He feels rather than sees McKay’s hand on his arm. “I know, John,” he says softly. His breath is warm against John’s ear and all he needs to do is turn his head ever so slightly so that their lips align and then they’re kissing. So softly, like it’s their first kiss, like they don’t know each other at all, and maybe they are. Two men meeting with nothing but hope and no ruined aspirations burning in their bellies. In that moment it is possible to leave behind everything he knows and in that moment John feels weightless, like he’s in an uncontrolled dive in an F16 and there’s nothing to do but wait for the collision of metal and earth.
Rodney avoids his calls for months after.
running into your ex
He sees John in again in Geneva; he’s a civilian now, wearing beat-up jeans a shade too skinny for his age and a shirt rolled up to his sleeves. He’s standing on the steps to the Court with an easy grin for the cameras that makes it look like his face is all hard surfaces, teeth and dark eyes covered in reflective glass. The photographers and journalists turn as one seething mass when Rodney steps out of his car, and his bodyguards shove a few of them when they get too close. His lawyer’s grip tightens as she tugs him up the stairs, and Rodney can only spare one glance as they go past; under the sunglasses, it’s hard to tell whether John looks back.
justice not vengeance
John answers the questions about his role in the Last War with a blank expression, with his shoulders stiff at attention. It’s taken some time for the Terran legal system to catch up with the complexities of interplanetary relations, but they’ve taken to it with fervour. Every single report in the SGC archives is being scrutinised, and all their decisions called to question. For the most part, the International Court is just making a point: they are inclined to be lenient with the saviours and defenders of the Earth, but they want to set a precedent for oversight.
John has duty to keep his face impassive when they ask difficult questions but Rodney does not: his testimony, televised live, has earned him something of a cult following. John chuckles when the news on his shitty hotel TV finishes with a segment of ‘McKayisms’, and stays behind in the viewing gallery to watch Rodney testify in various states of apoplexy.
the good life
He asks John whether he’s happy and wishes he didn’t want the answer to be ‘no’. But John just inclines his head and gives him a measured nod. “I’m-- not bad.”
“Civilian life suits you,” Rodney says, quite carefully, for him.
John smiles. “Never thought I’d see the day either.”
They’re more than lovers, less than friends-- but he’d be lying if he said he didn’t still feel the tug of gravity, of two objects in space trying to pull each other into an orbit. “I wish--,” Rodney trails off and then clamps his jaw shut, unable in this case to find the appropriate words.
“Yeah,” John agrees into the silence, an arm slung companionably around him.
“We won the war,” Rodney says bitterly. “That should be enough.”
John waits a few moments before drawing in a breath. “Like I said, Rodney, you’re not a soldier.”
This time, Rodney doesn’t feel qualified to argue.
the end is where we start from
John’s always known what Rodney is: a genius. One in a generation. Long after they’re dead and gone people will still be using his math and benefiting from his discoveries and memorialising his name. Rodney McKay is not a man that has to fear history; he’s written himself into the cold and vast empty spaces of the universe, he makes it bend to his will. And most of the time he behaves like he knows this, but then, all of a sudden, he’ll look at John with big eyes and a lost expression and ask, “Does it ever get any better?”
But the thing is, it’s Rodney, and Rodney doesn’t want anything but the truth and so John sets his jaw and tells him, “No it doesn’t,” even though he’d rather lie. It would be so much easier on both of them if he could.
“Then what are we doing?”
“We’re soldiers,” John says, and means it.
Rodney does not meet his eyes. “In whose war?”
He laughs without any mirth. “I didn’t expect to live long enough to ask.”
Rodney laughs then too, and their laughter turns genuine. “We’re a pair of miserable old bastards,” he pronounces, and John can’t help but agree.
They have lived longer than they had any right to. Rodney might be a genius but they both understand: he might be able to rewrite history and the universe, but they can’t rewrite themselves. This much, they must live with.
When he looks at Rodney in the fluorescent light of the hotel room he does not see the spires of Atlantis gleaming ghostly in the distance-- he sees, for the first time, just a man, like himself.
“I’m sorry,” John mumbles, against Rodney’s hair, and Rodney asks, “For what, for what?” and to that John has no reply.
Poll