Fic
Part 2
Unexpectedly, Rodney does end up dancing that night, only not with Sheppard. It’s a refreshing twist, and indicative, Rodney likes to think, of their changing luck in the Pegasus Galaxy: the Kurtabulans are pleased to meet them, and even more pleased to show them their collection of Ancient relics. They are most pleased when Rodney fixes a glitch in their power grid, bringing an end to a recent spate of rolling brown outs. And as a reward, they take him to their sacred library and assign him a beautiful blonde assistant. Kealla is attentive, impressed, and actually seems to have some idea what he’s talking about when he describes the compression algorithms on their Ancient database, and how he can decrypt them for her.
They’re invited to the second night of the Kurtabulans’ Pegasus-Standard Harvest festival. Rodney happily stuffs his face with the flakey cheese-filled pastries and crispy salted root vegetable. He dances with Kealla twice. The first time, he’s a little too nervous to enjoy it properly. It’s been a depressingly long time since he’s been in physical contact with a beautiful woman, a beautiful woman who actually seems to like him. He’s too stiff, fumbling his hands at her waist, getting embarrassingly distracted by the view he has straight down her gauzy top. By the time the song ends he’s sure he’s completely blown it with her. But she approaches him again later in the evening. By this time, Rodney’s knocked back a few of the fizzy drinks that taste like rootbeer and burn through your system like Zelenka’s rotgut. In a giddy rush of alcohol facilitated confidence, he twirls Kealla out into a spin, then pulls her back, flushed and giggling, into his arms, daringly letting his hands slip a little lower on her back. And she lets him, even leaning her weight into him a little. And god, Rodney feels like he’s on top of the world. This is easily the best day he’s had in - well, in a really long time. He smiles widely down at Kealla, and she smiles back, hesitantly reaching a hand up to rest on the side of his neck. The last person who touched him there like that had been John Sheppard. And remembering what had happened immediately after sends a pleasant shot of adrenaline and hopeful anticipation through Rodney’s system. God, he really has the chance here to end up spending the night with a beautiful woman. And that, of course, is when he screws it all up.
Thoughts of Sheppard had led to thoughts of sex, had doubled back on themselves and led to thoughts of where Sheppard - who, in retrospect, had been conspicuously absent all day - was now. Both Teyla and Ronon had enthusiastically joined in the festivities, Ronon proving to be a surprisingly graceful dancer, quickly surrounded by a bevy of dewy-eyed admirers. And Sheppard, Sheppard really should have been doing the exact same thing, enjoying the same kind of attention, but, of course, he wasn’t. He was standing off to the side, well clear of the main area of revelry. And from even 10 yards away, Rodney could read his body language so easily he might as well have had three foot high neon letters over his head spelling out “I Don’t Like To Be Touched.” Rodney knew the man had personal space issues, but this was ridiculous. How he ever expected to get laid - by people other than Rodney, that is, by female people - was completely beyond him. And even as he told himself that John Sheppard was a grown man - a grown man with orders of magnitude more currency in the dating world than Rodney himself - even as he screamed internally that he was abandoning a sure thing, a blonde sure thing with all the right kinds of curves - even as he mentally cursed his immense stupidity, he found himself reluctantly and apologetically disentangling himself from Kealla and making his way out of the dance circle.
“You clearly need a drink, Colonel,” he said, offering Sheppard a glass of the fizzy homebrew. Sheppard didn’t even look his way.
“Somebody has to stay sober, McKay.”
“Oh come on, Colonel. It’s a party. The Kurtabulans love us. Besides, the Pegasus Galaxy totally owes us an ambush-free night of drunken revelry.”
“Well, I’ll certainly keep that in mind,” Sheppard replied flatly.
Rodney was a little bit drunk, so he might have tried to press the drink on Sheppard, and he might have misjudged the angle somewhat, and he might have sloshed some of the rotgut onto Sheppard’s sleeve, and he might have reached out to wipe it off. At which point, Sheppard most definitely jumped back like a scalded cat.
Rodney was a little bit drunk, so it might have taken his massive intellect a little longer than normal to work out what had just happened.
Sheppard had just, had just, fallen all over himself to avoid being touched. By Rodney. And that? That was just. That was. Preposterous!
“What?!” Rodney flailed, “What is wrong with you?!”
“Nothing!” John yelled back. And this was so patently untrue, that they both lapsed into a momentary silence. Finally: “You certainly seem to be having a good time,” John said sullenly.
“Yes. Yes I was.” Rodney said, placing emphasis on the was. “You see, in an amazing turn of good fortune I was enjoying the company of somebody who also seemed to be enjoying mine.”
“Well, she certainly had her hands all over you,” John bit out.
“We were dancing!” yelled Rodney. And then a second later when it hit him what John was so upset about, “You! I cannot believe you! Look, I know you have this whole weird touching thing. And obviously there’s been all that, that,” and here Rodney made a vague hand gesture between the two of them, “transference going on lately, but this, this is going too far. It’s fine if you don’t want to let any of these people near you, but you’re not allowed to decide that for the rest of us. I mean, it’s completely irrational for you to get upset because somebody touched me!”
At this point Sheppard turned to look at him, which should have been an improvement, but really, really wasn’t. His eyes were cold, and his tone was even icier when he stated, slowly and with excessively precise diction, “There’s no reason for me to get upset when some woman touches you.”
He might as well have said, “Did you just say you were a Wraith worshipper?” or “Those are my men you have imprisoned in your underground torture chamber,” or “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” It was a tone of voice that reminded you that Lt. Colonel John Sheppard had once killed 50 Genii soldiers with the press of a button; it was a tone of voice that Rodney was trained to respond to with extreme dread, which he promptly did, feeling the visceral jolt of terror right in the pit of his stomach. But dammit, he hadn’t done anything wrong. Sheppard was the one ruining his night.
“No,” he replied, wobbly but resolute. “You should - you should be, you know, happy for me.”
Sheppard only made a sort of choked off sound of rage and disbelief, executed a crisp about-turn and strode off stiffly into the night. Rodney felt terrible, and of course, his night was ruined. And worse, he was completely baffled by the whole thing. All he could hope for at this point was that it would all resolve itself in the morning.
As usual, Rodney had been too optimistic. The morning brought with it the Wraith queen of all hangovers, and a reminder that Sheppard could be a sadistic bastard when the spirit moved him: rousing them all at o-ass-crack-of-dawn to hustle them to the gate at double time, making a point of repeating all his orders, observations and conversational inanities at least twice, much louder than necessary, right next to Rodney’s aching brain.
And it didn’t stop when they got back to Atlantis. John now taking every opportunity to avoid Rodney, even going so far as to take the team out of off-world rotation on some pretext of organizing Marine training schedules. This was a sulk of epic and previously unexperienced proportions: Teyla and Ronon had even started giving Rodney disapproving looks, which was just so patently unfair. It lasted six days, Rodney responding by becoming shorter and more abrasive with everyone else within range until he succeeded in clearing the lab, even Zelenka finally stalking off, muttering venomously in Czech. And to top it all off, he couldn’t even make use of the blissfully idiot-free workspace. His concentration was completely blown, and he ended up playing 1,325 rounds of minesweeper, until it was reasonable to stumble blearily off to bed.
Some time around the fifth day, Rodney decided that he was avoiding Sheppard too, devoting five hours to programming in three layers of unbreakable locking protocols into the control panel on his doorframe, so that when Sheppard finally came slinking around to apologize, he would have to stand out in the hallway, begging through the closed door until Rodney relented and let him in.
On the seventh night, Sheppard showed up at his quarters, the doors sliding swiftly and obligingly open for him. Rodney spent the first 10 seconds after Sheppard’s arrival being disgusted that his embarrassingly eager door still loved Sheppard more than him. Then he spent the next 10 seconds feeling victorious and pleased that Sheppard had finally come crawling to him. He would have normally devoted more time to both those reactions, but when he took a moment to really look at Sheppard, he didn’t look anything like someone who had come to apologize. He looked, actually, like he had run all the way here, a kind of frantic color on his cheeks and throat. He looked like a man who had been driven to extremes of endurance - like he was out of luck, or out of time. And Rodney forgot all the carefully worded sarcasm he had been hording and polishing for the last six days. He forgot everything but fixing whatever had happened, of fixing him and Sheppard, of removing his own week’s worth of misery, of taking that look off Sheppard’s face.
Rodney rose from his desk, “I --,” he began, right as Sheppard interrupted, dark and low, “I want you to fuck me.”
“W-What?” Rodney managed to stutter out.
“I want you,” said Sheppard, sounding angry and scared, “to fuck me.” And he demonstrated this plan by violently stripping out of his clothing. Rodney had no idea what was going on, and he was petrified by the fear of doing or saying the wrong thing. But clearly -- as Sheppard stood before him completely naked, his eyes dark, his mouth a thin, tight line -- not doing anything at all was just about worse than anything else he might come up with.
“I, I don’t….I’ve never….”
“I’ll show you,” said John, and he didn’t sound any worse than he had before at least, so Rodney claimed that as a victory. But, god, he had no idea how he was going to accomplish this. He was roughly about as turned on right now as he was for mandatory therapy sessions with Heightmeyer, which is to say: anxious, unsure, and trying not to reveal how much he didn’t know what he was doing.
John came over to work at Rodney’s pants while Rodney pulled his shirt over his head. And before Rodney was all the way undressed, John was stroking him, pulling a little roughly at his cock, and Rodney suddenly didn’t know where to put his own hands, hooking them awkwardly around John’s neck. He tried to lean in for a kiss, but John shifted at the last minute and his lips glanced off a cheekbone instead. Hobbled by the pants down around his knees, Rodney’s forward momentum threatened for a moment to topple them both, forcing John to quickly re-adjust Rodney’s weight, in the process tightening his grip rather painfully on some of Rodney’s tenderer bits.
“Ouch,” he wheezed.
“Sorry,” said John.
“Look,” said Rodney, “This really isn’t working.”
John froze, then removed his hands and slowly stepped back, turning and stooping to pick up his discarded shirt.
“Wait! What are you doing?” Rodney demanded, hastily attempting to unlace his boots. “I just meant. Can we just start over?”
John paused and waited for Rodney to work free of his pants and boxers.
“Can we. Can we? On the bed?” Rodney asked hesitantly, and when John took the few steps to the narrow Atlantis-standard sleeping alcove, Rodney pushed him gently down onto his back, crawling on after him.
“Maybe we should go a little slower,” he said, running a hand over John’s chest, leaning in to kiss him. John just lay there unresponsive at first, but Rodney was nothing if not persistent, and he just kept nipping at John’s lips, getting in little licks to the corners of John’s mouth, drawing lazy circles with his hand on John’s stomach, occasionally brushing a nipple with the flat of his thumb - all the little tricks he had already learned from months of experimentation - until all at once John just melted into the mattress, giving up the desperate thrumming energy that had carried him to Rodney’s quarters.
And that right there, that meant Rodney could fix this, he could put things back to the way they were before - to better than they were before. And he was going to do it. He ran a hand up along the long tendon of John’s neck, tipping his head to the side and then nuzzling into the shoulder joint, worrying the skin between his teeth, then licking over the reddened skin, laying sucking kisses all the way up to John’s ear. John was shivering underneath him now, but he was just getting started. He settled himself between John’s legs, grasping one of John’s wrists in each of his hands and bringing his arms down to pin them firmly at his sides. Then he started on the right, turning John’s hand palm up and pressing a lingering kiss to the center, then his wrist, licking lightly along the bend, the inside of his elbow, where Rodney sucked slowly and deliberately at the delicate skin, harder and harder until a bruise was just starting to bloom up to the surface, and John gasped, “Rodney! Rodney, you have to do it now!”
Do what now? Rodney thought, even as he glanced over to see John’s cock, curving hard and red and slick against his stomach, even as he stumbled off the bed at John’s direction to fumble through the clothes on the floor for the condom and lube John had brought. And then, back to the bed, where John promptly snatched them out of his hands, thankfully not giving him the chance to fuck everything up again.
“Need to do this fast,” John was saying as he pushed Rodney up against the head of the bed. He straddled Rodney’s lap, one hand on Rodney’s right shoulder for support as he quickly worked his lube slick fingers into himself. Jesus Christ, thought Rodney, as John arched up at his own touch. Then he was tearing open the condom packet with his teeth, rolling it onto Rodney’s furious erection, lifting up and sinking down into Rodney’s lap. Onto Rodney’s cock.
“Oh. My. God.”
“Yeah,” said John, rising up again, and then sinking back down.
“Oh. My. God.”
“Yeah,” said John, and this time there was the ghost of a smug grin on his face.
Rodney unclenched his hands from the sheets to curl them around John’s hips, boosting him up a bit, tugging him back down. John’s own hand curled tightly around the back of Rodney’s neck, and he looked down into Rodney’s eyes.
“K-kiss me,” he said.
Rodney leaned forward to press his mouth to John’s, and the change in position set off an explosive chain reaction: John convulsed, tightening around Rodney to the point of excruciating pleasure. They somehow ended up with John on his back, hands gripping Rodney’s shoulders, hard enough to bruise, Rodney thrusting into him, sobbing out, “John, John,” on each breath.
When it was all over, Rodney couldn’t help compulsively pressing kisses to all of the parts of John he could reach. John curled into his touch, cradling a hand around the back of Rodney’s head. And when Rodney woke up in the morning, he was gone.
~~~
Rodney supposed they were dating now. And he really didn’t have much experience in that area, or least not experience that didn’t end in embarrassing and painful ways. He tried inviting Sheppard over for dinner once: Chicken Cacciatore MRE’s and Athosian ale, with coffee made from real Kona beans that he had depleted his entire stash of fun size Hershey’s bars to purchase. Sheppard took one look at the set up and his body snapped to rigid attention.
“I’m not your fucking girlfriend, McKay,” he snarled out.
It was so very, very on the tip of Rodney’s tongue to snap back, Oh really? Well, you could have fooled me, what with the insane possessiveness. Oh, and the jealous rage, because, my god, did Sheppard do a convincing scorned woman, and dammit, he had gone to some effort here. But for once he bit his tongue. Hard. Because he wasn’t really sure they were completely over that rough patch. And Rodney didn’t have a good track record with relationships, which meant he was going to have to try a little harder not to fuck this up. And this friendship with John, this friendship with pretty amazing benefits -- he really didn’t want to fuck it up.
“Yeah. Ok,” he said. Which pretty much seemed to take the wind out of Sheppard’s sails. They ate the dinner, and drank the coffee, which was worth almost as much as Rodney had paid for it. And afterwards they even had some pretty decent sex. And Rodney never tried to ask Sheppard on another date.
Instead things went mostly back to normal. On QMT-316 they had to sit through four interminable hours of negotiations over Pegasus wheat. At hour 2, John put his hand on Rodney’s thigh under the table, rubbing along his inseam, just brushing against his balls. Rodney let him do it until he couldn’t take it anymore, and then he grabbed John’s wrist and dug his fingernails hard into the skin on the back of his hand.
At hour 3.5, Rodney slid his own hand onto John’s thigh, letting it rest high up at his hip crease, his fingers splaying lower, for a full minute. Then he started to move it in gentle, teasing circles, down to John’s knee, over to tug his leg slightly open, all along the inside, until he flipped over to the outside right before he got to anything interesting. Below the table, John got steadily harder, his thigh muscles quivering slightly underneath Rodney’s hand. Above the table, John looked immensely interested in, and gratified by, the discussion of harvesting operations and export costs.
At hour 4, they bid their hasty adieus, John grabbing up the sample box of Atlantean pharmaceuticals to hold strategically in front of his groin. They entered the gateroom at a brisk trot, and when Elizabeth asked them how the trade negotiations had been, Sheppard answered, “Stimulating!” with a ridiculous grin.
“Yes, yes,” Rodney replied, with a more appropriate shading of sarcasm, “Fascinating. Who knew ‘separating the wheat from the chaff’ was more than just a folksy colloquialism?”
And then Sheppard dragged him down the hall to his quarters, where Rodney fucked him, hot and sloppy, up against a wall.
~~~
On DFX-306, Rodney fixed a problem with the city’s Ancient defense grid while Teyla made polite chit-chat with the head of the council, and Sheppard and Ronon got a tour of the capitol dome. The government of Fas was grateful and appropriately effusive when Rodney finished repairs, which was gratifying. And then they decided they wanted to keep him, which wasn’t so gratifying (It’s been 42 days since our last kidnapping/drugging/use of a last resort contingency plan).
“I do not think so,” Teyla growled, low and dangerous, when the councilor approached her with this plan. She then proceeded to shoot out the legs of two the guards, smashing the butt of her P-90 up into the face of a third, taking out the fourth with a sort of Vulcan shoulder chop-cum-knee to the groin. This was also gratifying, and would, undoubtedly, have facilitated their immediate escape, if not for the remote-control short range stunner cannons which were now up and running at 110% of their former efficiency - thanks to Rodney.
The council of Fas agreed to release his team-mates unharmed if Rodney agreed to stay and be their pet scientist. Apparently they thought that if they made it slightly inconvenient, no one would bother coming back for him.
With the Fas’ gate shield now fully operational, it took them a week by puddlejumper. By the time Sheppard arrived, armed to the teeth and slightly crazy around the eyes, Rodney had re-keyed the grid to his ATA gene and was waiting for his rescue party in the control room.
“Are you ok? Did they hurt you?” Sheppard demanded, tense and frantic, tipping Rodney’s head back and forth, pressing his hands into Rodney’s chest and back to check for bruises.
“I’m fine. I’m fine. But the room service here sucks, and I want to go home now.”
But Sheppard clearly wasn’t done. “I’m going to kill those fucking bastards,” he was muttering, turning over each of Rodney’s hands, checking the back of his head. Rodney drew the line when John started to tug the shirt out of Rodney’s waistband.
“Colonel!” he barked, bringing his hands down to capture Sheppard’s. “I’m fine. Really.”
John looked up at him critically. “Yeah?” he asked, wrapping his fingers around Rodney’s wrists.
“Yeah,” said Rodney quietly. “I’m good.”
“Good,” said John, disentangling himself and straightening up. “Now I’m going to go destroy those motherfuckers.”
“John!” Rodney yelled, reaching out to re-snag Sheppard’s nearest wrist. “I’m fine. Nothing needs to be destroyed.” He looked steadily into Sheppard’s eyes until he felt him relax, minutely, under his fingertips. Then he looked up to see Ronon and Teyla, tensely flanking the doorway, and back at Sheppard. Each one of them alone was packing enough C4 to raze the civilization of Fas to the ground. Then Sheppard’s radio clicked to life.
“Sir, we’re in position. Please advise.”
Rodney made Sheppard recall his three companies of marines. He also expressly forbade him from shooting anyone, but Sheppard seemed slightly mollified when Rodney told him about the four guards Teyla had already crippled for life.
“That is true,” said Teyla, and she did not appear particularly remorseful. Ronon visibly perked up at this news as well.
Rodney completely disabled the defense grid - pulverizing the control crystals (he let the Armeggedon Triplets blow them with a small amount of C4 - it seemed to make them happy), and cross-wiring the command relay, to the point where not even someone as smart as him would be able to fix it. And then, back on Atlantis, he let Sheppard personally lock their address out of the database, which he did with a ridiculously exaggerated amount of relish that was almost endearing.
~~~
On PRT-114 it was a brunette, not a blonde, but she was a biochemist, which was practically a real science, with the sense to recognize his superior expertise, and the self-confidence to make him work for her respect. Sheppard sniffed her out even before Rodney did, and immediately lost the lazy flyboy smirk he’d been sporting all afternoon.
Rodney may not have had the best inter-personal skills, but he wasn’t stupid - rather impressively far from it, in fact. And he had never in his life had to be taught any lesson twice.
He spent 10 hours with her touring the genetics labs (where Rodney barely bothered feigning interest) and the Ancient molecular synthesizer (where Rodney nearly had a paroxysm of glee - which was all tempered slightly by the fact that the facility was clearly an abandoned prototype with a severe power hemorrhage, which would take years to scale up to useful productivity - but still, a Matter Replicator!). She showed him how the plant was engineered, interfaced and operated, and Rodney showed her how to improve efficiency by 3.5%. And at the end of the day, when she invited him back to her place to continue discussing the finer points of bioengineering, Rodney politely but firmly declined.
“Where are Sheppard and Teyla,” he asked Ronon, who had been silently shadowing him all day, playing with his collection of knives when he got bored (one in each boot, right calf, small of the back, left inner thigh, two in the hair - and those were just the ones Rodney knew about).
“State Hall,” Ronon replied succinctly. “Reception.”
“Oh god, food!” moaned Rodney, suddenly remembering that all he’d had to eat so far on this mission were two slightly stale powerbars.
Ronon grunted in agreement, and strode off, leading the way.
He was already on his third tastes-like-chicken kebab - Ronon had made him wait until he’d completely devoured his first one before he approved their citrus-free status, which was the only reason he was one behind - by the time he spotted Teyla and Sheppard, trapped in, no doubt stultifying, conversation with some over-stuffed bureaucrat. Teyla looked genuinely interested and engaged - a trick none of the rest of them were clearly ever going to learn from her. Sheppard instead was clearly projecting “interested and engaged”, with his toothpaste smile and his patented intimate lean.
“Think we should rescue them?” he asked, his mouth full of pseudo-chicken, gesturing with his denuded skewer.
Ronon grunted his lack of enthusiasm for this plan, continuing to grab likely items off the buffet table.
“Yes, yes,” Rodney conceded, “this fried flat thing is quite good. Just two more, and then we’ll go over.”
Rodney was finally able to tear them both away using the miracle of plates. He affixed one to each of Ronon’s hands, piled them both to the edge of structural integrity, then pushed Ronon in the direction of Sheppard and Teyla. It turned out having a large and lethal looking caveman looming silently over his food, like a big hungry cat over a recently slaughtered antelope carcass, was enough to scare of the most self-important government official.
Teyla smiled at the two of them, and Sheppard snagged a quasi-chicken kebab out of the middle of Ronon’s plate with a move of Jenga-like finesse. Rodney quickly removed his own plate from Ronon’s other hand before there was an incident. And Teyla calmly appropriated a purple custard shell from the top as soon as it came within reach.
“Where’s Mayjar?” Sheppard asked around his skewer, his very hair projecting “casual and nonchalant” to anyone who was interested.
“Who?” asked Rodney, crunching happily into third piece of fried flat thing.
Sheppard rolled his eyes. “Dr. Afusan?”
“Oh, her. Don’t know. We were done. Maybe she’s around here somewhere.”
Sheppard didn’t reply, but he seemed to be really enjoying his might-be-chicken. Teyla, when he caught her eye, had a look of pleased vindication as though she had just collected on a long-odds bet, which probably couldn’t be entirely attributed to the fact that she had won the tug of war over the last some-kind-of-nut-and-maybe-cheese square.
~~~
On GSP-472 (It’s been an unprecedented 125 days since our last kidnapping/drugging/inadvertent military coup), Rodney had to shoot somebody, which he was really extremely unhappy about. But the Dakem had lured Ronon and Sheppard away with the promise of some kind of X-treme sports competition, and then proceeded to drug Teyla’s wine, as a prelude to dragging her off by the hair to serve as the head-man’s newest cave-frau. Apparently, Rodney wasn’t considered a worthy enough husband for her -- which was really rather offensive, and quite frankly preposterous, given that he wasn’t the one who had stooped to trying to drug his way into her affections. And really, how the Dakem chief thought that was going to work out for him was one of the great mysteries of the universe.
Teyla was leaning woozily into his side, and at least she was lighter than Sheppard. The Dakem chief and his two henchmen were between them and the tent flap, and, so Rodney thought to himself, What Would Teyla Do? Ronon had an energy pistol and was as big as a small horse, so he was essentially useless as a role model in scenarios such as this. Sheppard would have threatened to destroy their kingdom, their families, their domesticated pets and their entire stone age subculture, sow the ground with salt and make sure no life ever surfaced on their planet again. But Rodney lacked the edge of insane conviction to pull that one off.
It turned out Teyla would have punched Henchman #1 hard enough in the solar plexus to bring him to his knees. Rodney knew this, because that’s actually what happened. But she probably, had she not been drugged and a little off her game, also would have introduced the natives to the miracle of gunpowder in a way that would insure that at least one of the bad guys wouldn’t be following them. Rodney aimed low, nailing Henchman #2 in the foot (which was when Teyla, still leaning heavily on him for support, took out Henchman #1). The chief looked daunted but undeterred, so Rodney lobbed a flash-bang at his head, then cut their way out of the back of the yurt with the knife Teyla kept in her boot. And had she not been mostly unconscious at that point, Rodney felt sure that Teyla would have snorted dismissively at a culture so stupid they thought there was only one way out of a structure made essentially of cloth.
Their early return to Atlantis was greeted with a complete lack of sympathy. And Rodney had occasion, once again, to curse the vicious and preternaturally swift rumor mill.
“Our bet was clearly predicated on the scenario in which the incident in question was not caused by any member of the team, which it clearly WASN”T, so I don’t owe you anything!’ Rodney raged at Zelenka for at least the fourth time that day.
“No, no, I must disagree,” Radek insisted. “Was clearly precipitated by your lack of manly - how do you say it-virtues.”
In the end, Rodney handed over his four only partially used coffee filters just to get the Czech munchkin to shut up about it. The situation was redeemed however, when Sheppard showed up at his quarters later that night with actual coffee grounds. “You did good today, McKay” he said, and proceeded to demonstrate exactly how much he appreciated Rodney’s manly virtues.
~~~
It’s just the three of them - Ronon, Sheppard and Rodney - on BQW-516, or, as Rodney will soon start referring to it in his head, The Planet of the Gays. The Pingan are a nomadic, militaristic society, which is pretty typical of the Pegasus Galaxy, where everyone they meet is either part of a rural commune, evil, dedicated to a life of spartan devotion, evil, the lone survivor of a recently culled planet, evil, busy devising morally questionable biology experiments, or some combination of the above.
The Pingan men and the Pingan women exist mostly as separate tribes, only meeting up a handful of times a year. In fact, it is strictly forbidden (and god, if Rodney had a nickel for every time he’s heard that phrase in the past year) that they come in contact at any other time. Teyla looks skeptical the whole time the Pingan emissary is explaining this, stammering and blushing fiercely, addressing himself to Rodney, Ronon, Sheppard, and Teyla’s shoes. And when she leaves them there, as she’s stepping back through the gate, she gives each of them a pointed look that clearly says, ‘If there’s an incident while I’m gone you will be very, very sorry.’
As soon as the outgoing wormhole whooshes out again, the Pingan men transform into cheerful and enthusiastic hosts. The whole tribe is, of course, fascinated by their weapons, and their strange over-shirts. They love Sheppard’s wristband. The mission devolves into a sort of campfire storytelling hour where everybody swaps impressive tales of their manly exploits. Rodney ends up sitting staring sullenly at the completely dead read-out of his energy signature detector, wishing he’d gone back to Atlantis with Teyla when he’d had the chance, while a guy bigger than Ronon, wearing nothing but a small pair of leather shorts and a lot of beaded necklaces, drones on and on about some mammoth (bigger than four traals laid end to end) man-eating creature that appears to be a cross between a stegosaurus, an ostrich and a camelopard, and that he’s supposedly killed with his bare hands.
Ronon has clearly found his people, happily grunting at two attentive looking young Pingan warriors, while a third winds his hand playfully through Ronon’s dreads. Which. Actually, that’s kind of odd, thinks Rodney. And then he looks more carefully around the circle and notices that all the Pingans are a little more touchy-feely than is strictly warranted. And in retrospect, that guy Rodney thought was trying to steal his wallet maybe wasn’t so much trying to steal his wallet. It’s gotten dark by this point, but Rodney’s pretty sure there are two guys necking on the other side of the fire. He looks around frantically for Sheppard, sure he’s going to have to stop his team leader from offending one of the very tactile, very buff natives - God, if Sheppard gets into a fistfight, Teyla will never let any of them hear the end of it.
He spots Sheppard finally, and his kneejerk reaction is relief - The Colonel’s not engaged in any acts of violence. In fact, quite the opposite. He’s surrounded by a circle of admirers, sitting at his feet and gazing up at him raptly as he recounts some Pegasus bedtime story (and thus sure to be full of destroyed worlds and life-sucking bad guys), complete with swoopy hand gestures and exploding noises. John actually looks at ease, relaxed. There’s a tall, dark man, handsome in a rough, I-hunt-and-kill-large-animals-for-a-living way, and obviously one of the upper class (he’s wearing actual full-length pants, and some ridiculous sash-thing). He’s sitting at John’s elbow, already a little too close, laughing and smiling at John’s story. He leans in a bit, and his knee grazes John’s, and Rodney looks for the shift, for John to tense and turn away, but it doesn’t happen. John just leaves his leg there. And when sash-guy hands him a crude clay cup of some kind, John doesn’t do anything to avoid having their fingers touch. For a second Rodney is poleaxed with disbelief. And in the very next instant he’s trembling with an inexplicable and overwhelming rage. All he wants to do is go over and punch that guy in his goddamn grinning face.
Rodney has to stumble to sit down in some dark place outside the fire’s circle of light, because he’s pretty sure he’s having an epiphany. And in his experience, it’s always better to be sitting down for those, with as few witnesses as possible.
So, #1: John’s gay. Okay, maybe he should have figured that out a little earlier. But in his defense, there were extenuating circumstances - in fact, the entire Pegasus Galaxy ought to qualify as one huge harrowing, fantastic and ridiculously improbable extenuating circumstance. And #2: all the inane right-wing Christian homophobic rhetoric is so totally, totally true. As far as Rodney’s concerned, John can go collect his toaster oven any time he wants. He’s absolutely made Rodney gay. He’s made him gay for John.
~~~
John’s lying on his bed, fully clothed, reading some enormous hard-backed novel, when Rodney stumbles through his door. His dramatic entrance loses something, he feels, from the fact that he had to spend 45 minutes re-programming, short-circuiting, and shamelessly begging Atlantis to let him in.
“What’s wrong?” asks Sheppard, coming instantly alert. “Why didn’t you radio?”
“No, no,” snaps Rodney, flustered and impatient, and now completely off his stride. “It’s nothing like that.” When he practiced this in his head, it was completely suave and beautifully efficient: explaining everything without the need for any actual tedious explanation. In his head, he was able to convey intent with the force of his gaze. Now, he can feel himself turning red, looking everywhere but at John, as he stutters out, “I want you to f-fuck me.”
There’s a moment of silence which Rodney spends wishing Atlantis had been just a little more adamant about keeping him out. When he finally looks at John, he’s standing a couple feet away, looking confused and a little wary.
“Why?” he asks.
“What? Why does there have to be a reason?” Rodney blusters, irritated and panicking that John, contrary bastard that he is, is going to make Rodney spell it out in painfully explicit detail.
“Well, there’s usually a reason.” John sounds amused, but he isn’t. And neither is Rodney.
“Well, what was your reason? The first time you -“ Rodney snaps back with, then flails briefly before settling on “offered.”
John’s eyes go dark, and his voice goes cold. “That’s different, McKay.” It’s clearly a warning, but Rodney figures it’s a little late in the game for that kind of bullshit, so he just raises his chin to meet it.
“No,” he says firmly. “No, it’s not.”
Sheppard’s suddenly right up in his personal space. “What do you think you know about it?” he growls right into Rodney’s face.
“I know all about it,” Rodney says, his eyes never leaving John’s. He doesn’t even stutter. Because John’s clearly furious - he’s so angry it’s vibrating through him. But he’s using the anger, using it like he uses it on alien planets when things go bad, like he uses it when anyone threatens his people, his city, the things he cares about. He’s using it to hide how terrified he is. John’s staring straight back at Rodney, daring him to get this wrong.
So Rodney takes a deep breath. “Maybe,” he says. “Maybe it was different for me before. But it’s not now.”
“What changed?” asks John softly - very, very softly.
“I may have incorrectly analyzed certain, um, situations, early on. But, I can assure you that I’ve re-thought the whole thing. I definitely, definitely get it now.”
One side of John’s mouth twitches up in the suggestion of a smirk. “Did Rodney McKay just admit he was wrong about something?”
Rodney seizes on this opening with desperate relief. “Yes, yes. Enjoy it while you can, Colonel. We both know the odds of its happening again are vanishingly small.”
John’s still looking steadily at him, searching his face for something. “Rodney,” he whispers. “Tell me what you want.”
“I want this. I want you.” is what Rodney says. And he puts his lips just barely against Sheppard’s, just breathing his air. He slides himself completely into John’s space, fitting his body against John’s body, spreading his warmth against John’s warmth, persisting, insisting, until John has to give in, has to believe him, has to let him in and hold on.
And later, when John has three fingers inside him, and he twists them, Rodney can’t figure out why he waited so long, why he made John wait so long. But when he looks up at John he can see in his face, like invisible ink magically appearing on the page, why John waited. And Rodney doesn’t know how this happened, or why, or how he hasn’t managed to irrevocably fuck it up before now (although clearly he’s come close). But he doesn’t want to think about it; he doesn’t want to think. He only wants to feel John inside him, wants to hold on, twine his fingers through John’s free hand, demand that John kiss him, and give him everything, everything he feels, everything he has.
Rodney falls asleep curled around John, his face pressed to the back of John’s neck, one arm slung low over a hip, a knee wedged between John’s thighs. And when he wakes up in the morning, John’s still asleep, snoring softly, still in the circle of Rodney’s arms.