Fic
Part 2
They’re all gathered in the mess for Atlantis’ non-denominational winter holiday party. It’s the one big public event of the year, attendance is mandatory, and the place is buzzing. They’ve got alcohol, the mellow fruity stuff from the mainland, and a dj spinning a scavenged collection that hits new highs of eclecticism, cycling between Motown, great 80s hits, hip hop and Latin dance. A contingent of Athosians is there, as well as a handful of Taratiks, the newest refugees from PLN-438, and a visiting delegation of Rotulians.
People have really gone all out - Sunday best as far as the eye can see. The Atlantis personnel are in their most presentable uniforms --the ones with the fewest patches and the most remaining buttons--, except for those of them whose high collateral damage lifestyles have already forced them to go native. John himself is wearing a dark purple Athosian overshirt and leather pants, but he takes a certain pride in seeing the faded khakis, reds and blues flashing in the crowd, marking the people of the Atlantis expedition, marking his people.
He’s on his third drink by the time Physics and Engineering shows up. Predictably, they have to be dragged from the labs, but someone sent them home to change first, and Rodney’s wearing a sapphire blue Pendagon great-shirt that looks really, really good on him. John lets himself enjoy the view for a few seconds before he turns his gaze back to the unruly dance floor.
He dances with Elizabeth to some pulsing Electronica. And with Teyla, to the Four Tops. He gets pulled into a sweaty, possibly non-Uniform Code-compliant Conga line of Marines, and braves one turn around the dance floor before escaping to the self-service bar, where he services himself with another drink.
A petite, dark-haired Athosian girl shyly asks him to dance - he thinks her name is Rina, and she can’t be more than 22 years old. He puts one hand at her waist, and the other safely extended to her shoulder, and sways her through ‘Every Breath You Take’, until it looks like she’s taking the lyrics a little too much to heart, at which point he bows his forehead to hers, thanks her for the dance, and retreats to the safety of the upper balcony with his fifth drink.
It’s chilly out here, but this side of the planet never really gets that cold, so it’s a pleasant change from the over-heated air of the mess hall. He figures he’s put in the face-time, and he can spend the rest of his designated party hours out here before heading back to his quarters. When the door whooshes open behind him, he’s really only hoping it’s not the Rotulian ambassador - she’s been eyeing him all evening - so he hasn’t had a chance to put up his Rodney-specific barriers, and he’s actually pretty tipsy besides.
“Colonel.”
“McKay.”
Rodney comes to lean his elbows on the railing next to John. And John deliberately doesn’t look over. It’s really about the only thing he can do now to delay the inevitable.
“You know,” says Rodney conversationally, “I don’t really understand you at all.” And Rodney isn’t drunk enough not to know what he’s doing, he’s not drunk enough to say whatever he’s thinking - because he does that anyway. But he is drunk enough to ask questions he knows he’s not supposed to ask, questions he probably won’t like the answers to. Specifically: “What is it you want, Sheppard?”
And now John swings his head to look at Rodney. He’s a little flushed, the top two buttons on his shirt open. And John thinks, I want that.
I want Atlantis safe from the Wraith, and while we’re at it, the whole Pegasus galaxy. I want Elizabeth to be able to sleep through the night. I want Teyla to have a family. I want Ronon to have a home. I want Lt. James Felty, 24 years old, Company C, known to his friends as Shortstop, from Hereford, PA, not to have died last week on QCL-396. I want the Genii to stop fucking with us. And I want someone else to do this shitty job.
John thinks about it for a minute, and then he decides, what the hell, it’s Non-denominational Winter Holiday. This is his Non-denominational Winter Holiday present to himself. He lets his mouth tip up into what he knows is a mischievous grin.
“I want to dance,” he says.
Rodney looks uncomprehending for a second, then intensely irritated. “Right,” he says. “Clearly you came out here because you wanted to dance. Look, Colonel, would it kill you to be serious for once? You don’t need to, you know, give me that movie actor routine. I thought - I thought we were friends.”
And that almost stops him. Because Rodney is his friend, maybe the best one he has here. And if he keeps fucking around like this, he doesn’t know how much longer that’s going to last. But John’s not going to stop, at least not right now. Because whatever people might think about him, he’s really never been very good at the whole self-control thing.
“Just because you don’t like the answer, Rodney, doesn’t mean I’m not serious.” And he lets the truth of it bleed through a little.
“You want to dance? Out here?” Rodney crosses his arms over his chest. “With me?”
John nods and takes a step closer. Rodney keeps glaring at him. “Come on, Rodney. Just one dance,” he wheedles. “After all, it’s Christmas.”
And Rodney tilts his chin up, like he’s going to keep fighting, but he slowly lowers his arms to his sides. And that’s all the invitation John needs. He presses in close, his hands on Rodney’s waist. They’re playing something that sounds to John like Spanish ballroom music, and Rodney lets him just sway them to the beat. He’s practically got his cheek resting against Rodney’s neck, and it feels good. It feels really, really nice. It’s a relief really. This is all he needs, just this much, and then he can go back to the way things were before, forget about it for awhile. And it’s good to know he’s not so far out of line that he won’t be able to find his way back. And it’s all just. Good.
And then Rodney huffs indignantly, “Clearly you have no conception whatsoever of how to lead. Which really isn’t much of a surprise, given your abysmal navigational skills.” And he manhandles John until he’s got one hand at John’s lower back, the other holding John’s right hand out to the side. “This is the tango,” he says. And suddenly Rodney’s leg is wedged in tight between John’s, and he’s forcing him back, swiveling his hips at the same time.
John stumbles at first, but Rodney steadies him with the hand at his back, and he falls pretty quickly into the rhythm of the sliding half steps. And then Rodney picks up the pace, turning John, then spinning him in a tight curl that presses him up against Rodney’s chest, wrapping one leg high up around John’s thigh for a second, then pulling John all the way up against him, hips to chest, right before he shoves forward, and, Christ, he’s actually dipping John, and it should be kind of awkward and ridiculous but it’s not, not at all. And the whole thing has John so turned on that there’s no way Rodney won’t be able to tell as soon as he pulls John back up and in.
“Oh. Um.” Rodney releases his hold. And John would definitely take that as his cue to leave, but Rodney’s between him and the door.
Rodney’s flushed and glistening with sweat, which isn’t really helping with John’s condition any. But he’s not moving, looking a little down and away as he says in a rush, “Look, I’ve been thinking. There really aren’t that many opportunities to meet people here - I mean, people who don’t work for you or aren’t, you know, industrial spies or, or beings from another astral plane. And it seems like we could --. I mean, clearly we both could use --. And we have a certain amount of, er, experience with this already. Which worked out ok. And maybe,” Rodney waves a hand frantically between them, “Maybe we could help each other out?”
It takes John a good five seconds to work out what Rodney’s saying. And, god, Rodney really has been working for the military too long if he’s picked up stuff like “help each other out”. And the whole thing would almost be hilariously funny, except for the fact that it would tear John up into tiny pieces, blur the line so badly he’d never find it again.
And you can’t be subtle with Rodney. Subtle doesn’t take. So he says, low and mean, “Help each other out? What, like this?”
And he grabs Rodney’s head, pressing his fingers in hard to the base of his skull, and he lays on the wettest, lewdest kiss he can manage, biting at Rodney’s lips, fucking his tongue into Rodney’s mouth, sucking on Rodney’s tongue. And when he pulls back, Rodney’s frozen and staring, gasping for breath, his lips red and swollen.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” John says, his brief feeling of vindication swamped by a sudden rush of nausea. And he pushes past Rodney, back into the blaring party, into the empty corridor, to his dark room, where he thinks the door closed with extreme conviction, and tells Atlantis not to let anyone bother him unless it’s a Code Red emergency.
***
John was prepared for Rodney to avoid him for the next few days, a period of awkwardness that they would eventually work through. He was not prepared for Rodney to show up at his quarters the very next evening, already talking as he walked through the door.
“Listen, Colonel. I think we need to talk. About last night.”
And John’s got nothing. He was basically counting on universal principles of social conditioning and public embarrassment, but he should have known they didn’t apply to McKay. And now he’s hesitated too long, and Rodney’s taken the opportunity to barrel ahead.
“ - didn’t make myself clear. I mean, ehm, enthusiasm on your part is not really a problem. And given our circumstances, and our shared history, I still think it’s an ideal-“
“Rodney! We can’t talk about this.”
“Yes, yes, of course. I think you’ll find that I can be discreet. The need for -“
“No! I can’t talk about this. I can’t talk to you about this. I can’t do this.” God, this is new heights of obtuseness, even for Rodney. If he doesn’t get out of this conversation soon, he feels like his skin might burst right open, scattering pieces of Lt. Colonel John Sheppard all over the floor.
“I don’t understand -“
“Goddammit, Rodney! You have to stop. The answer is no.”
And that raises McKay’s hackles, thank god, and John expects a scathing retort, but what Rodney says is, “I have to stop? Well that’s rich, coming from the king of the mixed message. I swear, every time I turn around you’re looking at me like, I don’t know what, and then -“
And John feels like he’s just been sucker punched. It’s true. He’s been following the rules, and then rewarding himself by breaking them for weeks now. But he never thought Rodney would notice. He never thought Rodney knew.
“Oh god. You’re right. I’m sorry,” he croaks out. “Rodney, I. God. I’ll try to do better.”
And he must look as bad as he feels, because Rodney’s own face is a mirror of shock and dismay.
“John, what…” he tries tentatively.
But that’s the absolute last thing he can take. “I can’t,” he rasps one more time, and flees his own quarters, pushing past Rodney into the hall, to the nearest transporter, where he doesn’t bother selecting a destination, just tells Atlantis to take him somewhere far away.
***
They’re down to critical systems, trying to eke out a little more time from their rapidly depleting power sources. For once, they’ve got enough proteins, sufficient leafy greens, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of turat fruit. The infirmary is stocked with analgesics, composite surgical thread and sterile gauze-like pads. The armory is bristling with small and large arms, stocked to the ceiling and into four adjoining rooms with crates of ammunition. It’s the only thing John orders anymore on the infrequent Daedelus re-supply runs. And if he’s uneasy about the feeling that he’s gearing up for some kind of full-scale galactic war, the fear of being caught short is worse.
But none of that matters if they lose the ability to power and shield the city.
All but the nerve-center transporters are off-line, and John collects another bruise as he misjudges the corner in the murky stairwell near his quarters. If he’s quiet and concentrates, he can still hear Atlantis thrumming in the walls and floors, but she’s muted and distant, doesn’t recognize him, isn’t quite herself. And John is afraid. Because this machine, this simple union of energy and conduit, hardware and software, it’s not enough. There’s no way it can keep them safe.
The Upta have a gallery of valuable objects: a couple of pieces of modern sculpture, a small hill of Tingan black salt, an intricately woven Piltat tapestry in the style of Fenatha, a carefully arranged sunburst of cracked control crystals and, on a low pedestal in a far corner, an amber and gold zero point module.
“Oh my god. It’s fully charged!” Rodney tries to whisper, but it comes out as a hoarse shout. And John wants to snap at him when he sees the calculating gleam in their Upta host’s eye. But it’s not really fair to pin this one on McKay’s utter lack of guile. John can feel himself leaning in, while Ronon looks ready to grab and run, and even Teyla casts her eyes in the precisely opposite direction and licks her lips.
“We will not trade for it,” says Miloth, “but you can earn it.”
And those are, quite possibly, some of the most ominous words in the Pegasus Galaxy. But John doesn’t care. They never had any leverage in this negotiation anyway, and he’s ready to go - run the course, climb the mountain, jump the fire, chant the prayers, recite the first 105 digits of pi - whatever they want.
It doesn’t start to seem like a bad decision until much later. What John thinks instead, as the heavy leather lash comes down on his back again, slicing obliquely through an already opened welt of ruptured skin, is that he’s totally going to make it. He’s channeling the zeal of the Reality TV contestant. And if he’s lost a little perspective, it’s only bound to improve his odds.
But the bug eating was a walk in the park - the crunch of their brittle exoskeletons actually somewhat satisfying. Answering the mythic riddles of Upat Kreadon was a snap when he could crib just by asking the Ancient designed library database nicely. He demonstrated and conveyed knowledge by convincingly proving the Pythagorean Theorem to a hyperactive gaggle of ten year olds. The Ikak poisoning was less pleasant, but he sweated through it after five hours. And the seventeen lashes were painful, but bearable.
He slips in under the wire with the sowing of the 52 rows of Simat, stumbling to his knees at the end of the last furrow, the pink and gold gleam of Upat’s twin suns just gilding the horizon. Apparently it’s time for the next challenge already, because two burly attendants in matching vests grab him under each arm, haul him to his feet, and hustle him a few yards to thrust him into what seems at first to be a closet, and turns out to be a box, which they shut and lock, leaving John in utter darkness.
He starts to cramp up after 40 minutes. There’s no way to move or stretch, and the sweat from working the fields is drying, leaving him cold and stiff. A muscle spasm starts in his left thigh, jumping erratically under his hand every few minutes.
And it’s getting harder, sure, but he’s got his eyes on the prize. With a fully charged ZPM they could bring systems online that they don’t even know about yet. With a fully charged ZPM they have an early warning system again, a buffer to take the critical edge off every mission. With a fully charged ZPM he can buy a little breathing room for the marines, who are wearing down, for the scientists, who don’t sleep enough. A fully charged ZPM will give Elizabeth a chance to regroup. It will give McKay his opportunity to pull off the big miracle they all need. It will give them a chance.
For the next hour and a half that’s what he does. He thinks about what a fully charged ZPM means. Lights in non-essential areas. Movie nights. The thrum of Atlantis under his hand. Unrestricted showers. Recreational jumper use. Access to unexplored sectors of the city. New Ancient tech. DJ’d dance parties. Dancing. Dancing with McKay.
When they pull him out, the light from their lamps is a sudden and searing pain, bringing immediate tears to his eyes. His legs are locked up completely, and he can’t walk on them at all. It’s too bright where the lights are, and too dark where they’re not, for him to really make out anything at all. He just registers multiple sets of hands - lifting and tugging, and removing all his clothes. Which he would object to more if they weren’t filthy and sweaty and stiff, and if he hadn’t spent the last three odd hours locked with them inside a coffin sized box.
Once it stops being a scalding shock, the steaming bath is quite possibly the best thing he’s ever experienced. The leave him in until he’s barely conscious, a pliant noodle. He’s given something warm and spicy to drink. He’s given a pair of loose fitting pants that hang off the edges of his hips. He’s led to a room smoky with incense, where they paint him with black lines and circles, on his chest, his back, his arms.
Once he enters the circle of torches, John starts to return to alertness. There was probably a stimulant in that drink they gave him. And something else too, something that gives the torchlight a sparking halo, that paints vivid colors over the press of half-naked bodies stretching away into the dark.
This is clearly the grand finale, and John feels poised, he feels like he has a shot, he feels willfully optimistic, eyeing the guy on the other side of the ring - right up until the innermost circle of observers turns and draws down masks of white powdered clay over their faces, trailing lengths of snarled yarn, beads and leaves and scraps of bone, like hair, a caricature at least as sinister and vastly more unnerving than the predators it’s designed to imitate.
The contents of John’s stomach try to convulse their way up his esophagus, but he fights it down as he reassesses the stakes -- which have just gone up --, and his chances -- which have just gone way, way down --, as he automatically starts circling his opponent at the banging of a gong which clearly signals the start of the first round.
The other guy is well-muscled and he’s moving too easily. It’s likely that he didn’t recently spend three hours locked in a box, and the seven before that planting 52 motherfucking rows of lentil sized seeds. He feints to the left, but John doesn’t even acknowledge it. It’s a sloppy move, which means the guy’s cocky. And John can use that to his advantage. It isn’t much of a stretch to put a bit of a drag into his left leg, telegraph his stiff muscles. He mirrors the guy around the ring for a while, trying to do a threat assessment on the gathered crowd. There isn’t really much point. He can’t see much beyond the nearest smoking torches, but he can tell there’s a lot of people out there. And it’s not like he’d make it beyond the first ring of Wraith look-alikes anyway, each armed with a metal-ringed wooden staff.
His opponent lunges, and John sidesteps, bringing up his knee as hard as he can into the guy’s ribs. He starts out with the element of surprise, but the guy recovers enough to throw himself sideways away from the blow. He’ll have a nasty bruise, but nothing’s broken. And that’s it, right there. The guy reassesses him from across the ring. He won’t fall for that twice. But they both know that he’s stronger than John. And they both know he’s going to win. And John hates losing. He really hates losing. He especially hates losing to Wraith worshipping assholes who string you along for 15 hours of party games with no intention of ever handing over their untouched, mint condition, never-been-out-of-the-box ZPM.
So he’s going to lose, but he’s sure as hell going to make this guy work for it. And he launches himself across the ring, slamming his foot into the guy’s right knee. He gets an elbow to the face that sends him reeling back. But he grins around the taste of blood in his mouth, because when muscle guy stands back up, his leg doesn’t straighten quite right.
Then it’s a head butt to the abdomen, followed by a throw to the ground that knocks the wind out of him. John gets in a kick to the groin that gives him a second to catch his breath. But now the guy seems pissed. And he comes up swinging, landing a couple of body blows and an upper cut John just manages to twist into a graze off his cheekbone. He keeps turning into the punch, capturing the fist in both his hands and wrenching it around as he ducks out from under it, until there’s a satisfying popping sound.
By round six they’re both moving pretty slowly around the ring. The fingers on John’s right hand are swelling up; his left eye feels like it’s being slowly forced closed; his left shoulder is rasping painfully in its socket, and two of the welts on his back have opened up again, and he can feel the blood trickling steadily down his back. But the other guy’s got a leg that won’t straighten all the way, at least one broken finger, a bruised rib, and a nasty looking bite mark on his upper arm.
The torches won’t resolve anymore, their light smearing across John’s field of vision in a kind of luminescent smog. The wooden staffs thud twice into the packed earth; the gong sounds. John’s opponent has gotten bigger, his skin radiating beyond its normal limits, and when he punches John in the face, he has far too many teeth. The wooden staffs beat twice; the gong sounds. The circle’s gotten smaller, John stumbling so close to the edge he can smell the vivid blue off the nearest bodies. He lurches away again, until he’s caught from behind in some kind of grappling hold. John kicks back, again and again, into the injured knee until the man with lots of teeth staggers and lets him go. Which turns out to be an empty victory since the sudden loss of counter-balancing weight immediately sends John to his knees. His left arm buckles when he tries to push himself up, and he falls on his face in the dirt, rolling onto his back to try and catch his breath. There’s something wrong with his chest, preventing him from getting enough air. The red is spreading, mixing with blue from the edges of the circle, and when he looks up his death is coming for him, wearing a white clay mask.
Fuck you and your fucking excessive realism, he thinks, and as the hand reaches for his chest, John throws his head back to look up at the night sky instead. Which is when Jumper 4 de-cloaks directly above the crowd, hatch opening in mid-air. There’s a noise like thunder, and a light like salvation: Ronon, Teyla, Rodney with his arm raised above his head, holding what looks like a remote detonator, the three of them flanking Elizabeth, who is standing at the edge of the ramp in black BDUs, purple flames at the ends of her hair, silver streamers curling out of her mouth. Without any rotor backwash, they are even more uncanny, an unperturbed tableau, Angels of Wrath come to take him home.
***
John spends six days in the infirmary: dislocated shoulder, broken fingers, scratched cornea, infected lacerations, bruised ribs. When he wakes up the first time the infirmary’s dark; the only thing he can see is McKay’s face floating by the bed, bathed in monitor blue.
“Too bad about the ZPM, huh?” he manages to croak out, jolting Rodney upright from his slouch.
“Are you kidding?” he hisses back, leaning over to stare into John’s good eye. “We got you, and then we got the ZPM. It turns out Elizabeth’s prime directives don’t apply to criminally deranged Wraith worshipping assholes. Thank Christ.”
The sudden and overwhelming relief is better than the pseudo-morphine drip. “If we have a fully charged ZPM, then what are you doing here, McKay?”
Rodney waves a hand dismissively. “I’m letting Radek have his five minutes.”
John feels a smile starting at the corner of his mouth, echoed back on Rodney’s face, creating some kind of feedback loop until they’re both grinning like loons.
“Oh god,” John gasps, “Thank god.” And just like that, his euphoria tips over into desperate sorrow. He’s suddenly on the verge of tears, quickly turning his head away from McKay, into the pillow, gasping in shaky breaths.
“You should sleep,” says Rodney after a minute. “Everything - Everything’s ok right now. You should get some more sleep.”
Don’t go, thinks John. He reaches out blindly with his left hand until he finds Rodney’s. And Rodney just sits back down and lets John hold his hand, tight and sweaty, until he slips back under into dreams.
***
He doesn’t see Rodney again for eight and a half days, and when he stumbles into the 9 am Senior Staff meeting, it looks like he hasn’t slept in that long either. Or showered.
“Can you give us a progress report, Rodney,” Elizabeth asks.
And Rodney pops up from behind his laptop to say brightly, “Well, we didn’t have anything better to do this week so we thought we’d hook up our new, fully charged, physically improbable, massive quantum energy source.”
It’s not even sarcasm. It misses sarcasm by about a mile. Elizabeth’s mouth quirks up, and Carson’s just full on grinning.
Rodney rests his chin on his steepled fingers. “We’ve got new sensors online: long-range, short-range, mid-range, biological, structural, algorithmic, infrared, ultraviolet, microwave, molecular, barometric, volumetric, baryonic. Our sensors have sensors. Which probably also have sensors. If a tree falls in the forest on any planet in this galaxy, there is probably a sensor somewhere in Atlantis that knows about it. Of course, most of that is wildly unnecessary, but what it does tell us is exactly where the structural damage is, and exactly how safe or unsafe the unexplored sections of the city are. We now have error-free Wraith detection, early warning for biological and nanotechnological agents, and a handy nametag system for keeping track of all Atlantis personnel. Since laws of probability dictate that any intruders who are not Wraith, alien small pox or self-replicating miniature robots, will be Genii agents, spies or collaborators, I’ve taken the liberty of coding those life signs to display as ‘Jack-booted war-mongering moron’.”
Rodney’s practically punch-drunk. Everyone in the room is enjoying the show, and John’s no exception.
“We’ve got automatic resource allocation, which means the city can manage its own energy sharing, improving efficiency by 2.7%. 60% of our systems are now rechargeable. And never has the saying ‘Nothing succeeds like success’, or ‘The rich get richer’, been truer. Having more energy allows us to make more energy. Or, to be strictly accurate, to save more energy. The puddle jumpers, for example, they slice, they dice, they double as really big fuel cells, converting kinetic energy every time you fly them. Plug them into central energy conversion and -Hey Presto-practically continuous shield generation. So go ahead, Colonel, joyride whenever you want.”
The smile Rodney turns his way is vaguely dreamy, and it sends a hot rush of pleasure straight to John’s groin.
“It turns out,” continues Rodney, swiveling back to address Elizabeth, “that the city of Atlantis is completely modular, capable of splitting into eight separate, autonomous, fully operational, life-supporting, floating, submerging, flying units. Of course, there’s only one stargate, but there are seven other control rooms with remote control capability.
As you all know, we depleted the entire arsenal of weapons drones during our last brush with soul-sucking annihilation. But,” and here Rodney leans forward and lowers his voice,” I’m going to tell you a secret.” His eyes dart around the room, and his grin is more than a little manic.
“What’s the secret, Rodney?” Elizabeth asks gamely.
“The secret!” Rodney announces delightedly, “is that we can make more! Replication and construction sites with pre-programmed, pre-fab templates have been located in Sectors 6.b and 5c and d. We’ve already run preliminary diagnostics and there should -“
“Rodney!” Elizabeth interrupts, “That’s wonderful news!”
Oh god, thinks John, oh god. He wants to jump up and down, grab Rodney and dance him around the room, go for one of those battery charging joyrides. He settles for throwing his arm over the back of his chair and smiling lazily.
“Not bad, McKay.”
Rodney doesn’t even call him on it. “Yes! Yes! Not bad, indeed. The Ancients have a very interesting take on mechanical engineering, you know. From what I can tell, there’s a self-organizing principle -“
And John could stay here all day with Rodney staring into his eyes, earnestly explaining the way the Ancients used crude distributed AI to make the marvels of engineering that will let him blow the Wraith into tiny, tiny pieces. But Elizabeth’s making wrap up the meeting noises, and Carson is stepping in to say he wants Rodney to take the next 12 hours off, re-hydrate, get some sleep.
“Yes, yes, I’ll sleep later, “ Rodney waves him off. But Carson has plenty of experience dealing with Dr. Rodney McKay. “You’ll sleep now, Rodney. None of these discoveries are going anywhere. I’ll get you a military escort if I have to.”
Rodney’s expression of dismay is comical in its intensity. It reminds John of the time he was barred from baseball practice because of unfinished chores when he was nine.
“But, Carson, I have to go back. You don’t understand; Zelenka’s vicious. He won’t wait for me. He’ll get to see it first, and then I won’t get a chance to figure it out before he tells me all about it.”
“I’m sending Radek to bed too. You can go back to work together, after you’ve both gotten some sleep.”
“Are you crazy?! You can’t have us both off-duty at once. The city will, will implode, or something. We’ll all die horribly.”
“Rodney,” Elizabeth intercedes, “I’m sure we can handle things for a few hours. If something goes wrong and we need your help, we’ll wake you. But unless and until that happens, you’re off-duty.” She’s put the note of command into it, and Rodney lapses into a slumped ball of defeat.
“C’mon,” says John, elbowing him in the ribs, “I’ll walk you back.”
“I’m perfectly fine,” McKay grumbles as he misjudges the distance and ricochets off the edge of the doorway.
“Right,” says John, grabbing his elbow and steering him down the hallway.
“You’re going to sleep right?” says John at the door to Rodney’s quarters.
“Yes, I’m going to sleep,” Rodney snaps as he stumbles over to his bed, clutching his laptop to his chest.
“Ok, well you won’t need this then,” and John reaches in and snatches the laptop, dancing quickly out of range.
Rodney stares down at his empty hands for a moment, and when he looks back up his eyes are sad and lost. “John,” he whispers, “you have to promise me something.”
And John’s heart lurches in his chest. He thought Rodney had taken pity on him. He thought Rodney was going to let it go. He can’t do this. He’s not allowed. But, god, if he could, he would promise Rodney anything, anything he wanted, anything he asked.
“You have to promise me you’ll make sure Zelenka leaves the lab. You have to personally go and make sure. Follow him to his quarters. Please.”
John lets out his held breath in a hiccoughing laugh. “I promise,” he says.
And with a sigh of relief, Rodney faceplants into the pillows and is out like a light.
***
Rodney gets almost nine hours of sleep before they have to wake him. Which is probably a new Atlantis record for him anyway. But somehow the thought isn’t much of a consolation to John as he pounds down the corridor, trying to buckle his sidearm to the leg of his sweatpants as he runs to the scene of the storm cloud attached to their most recent silver lining.
“I am going to kill Van Buren!” It’s the kind of threat Rodney makes about six times a day, but he seems to mean it a little more than usual.
“What’s the situation?” John demands as he skids into the gateroom.
“Oh, Colonel, you’re going to love this. This is classic Pegasus Galaxy slapstick comedy. Dr.Van Buren - and of course I use that appellation in the loosest possible sense - decided, in his infinite wisdom, that he would take it upon himself to test the remote dialing capabilities of Control Room 6. This despite the fact that he had neither authorization, permission nor, clearly, the rudimentary intelligence needed to carry out such a task.”
Rodney pauses for breath, a red flush of fury creeping down to the neck of his gray t-shirt, which reads, ‘Gravity: it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law’. Gone is the giddy enthusiasm of nine hours ago but, John has to admit ruefully, he likes this version of Rodney even more.
“In a reasonable universe, this act of immense incompetence would have resulted in nothing more than the Ancient equivalent of a blown fuse, but because God plays with loaded dice in this one, we’ve managed to hit three cherries all in a row. One: a failure of central control to over-ride remote commands. Two: because the stargate was actually activated at the time, an unstable looping branch created within the engaged wormhole. And three: because SGA-2 was actually en route through the wormhole at the exact time of the remote command, four expedition members stuck inside that looping branch.”
Lorne, Cadman, Parish and Buchanan are in there somewhere. John’s going to kill Van Buren.
“We have 38 minutes before we lose waveform integrity. Colonel, start the clock.”
John does, and is pathetically grateful to have been given a job.
Apparently, SGA-2 is sort of halfway between Atlantis and PZG-143 - where Van Buren dialed - except not really. It’s more like half of them is all the way to Atlantis and the other half of them, going to the Alpha site. Except that’s not it either. It’s more like half their probability mass. And that’s just about where John’s intellectual curiosity hits the wall.
Rodney gets two marines to remove the entire front panel of the DHD console, and then he just dives right into the messy innards. The room falls completely silent. So they can all hear with stunning clarity each time Rodney barks for a tool from Kusanagi, and his high volume radio consultations with Zelenka in Control Room 6, which sound a lot to John like slight variations on:
“No! That won’t work.”
“Wait. Check it now.”
“Is there a by-pass?”
“No, dammit! Try it again.”
“22 minutes,” he says to Rodney’s legs.
Rodney twitches, then goes silent for a minute. “Ok, here’s what we’re going to do,” he says, low and intense into the radio. And John can’t really follow the rest, but he can hear Zelenka’s bellowing right through the line.
“I’m perfectly well aware of that! But we don’t have time.” And Rodney’s holding his hand out, snapping impatiently, and Kusanagi somehow knows to put a green crystal into it.
At 19 minutes, Simpson and Zelenka show up with a naquadah generator that they attach directly to the stargate. At 15 minutes they clear the gateroom of all non-essential personnel, which clearly doesn’t include John, because he’s the goddamn time keeping device. At 10 minutes, Rodney crawls out from under the console, his t-shirt dark with sweat and clinging to his shoulders and upper back.
“Do it!” he yells. And Simpson flips the switch; the generator sends a pulse to the gate, which jolts, the wormhole pulsing and flickering, from blue to green to yellow. For a heart-stopping moment it looks like the gate’s empty, the weak signal snuffing out. And then the billowing whoosh as the blue wave rebounds into the room. Three crystals blow on the console, like flashbulbs going off, and SGA-2 walks through the gate, looking slightly bewildered at their reception.
John doesn’t think about it. He just grabs Rodney by the back of the neck and kisses him, hard, on the mouth.
And then all the sound rushes back into the room. There are cheers and yells. A medical team swarms the gate.
“I, um, need to take a shower,” says Rodney. And then he’s gone.
****
John takes his own shower: cold and brutally efficient. Rodney’s eyes, his shoulders, the back of his neck, his hands, flashing through his mind’s eye in quick succession. He doesn’t jerk off, because he’s let this go too far, and he needs to start exerting some control, pull himself together. He can’t afford to fuck up his military command; he can’t afford to fuck up his team, and his ability to make objective decisions in the field. And he can’t afford to fuck up his friendship with Rodney. God, he doesn’t even know when he started to develop a taste for straight guys with bad table manners. And broad shoulders. And crooked mouths. And deft hands.
He’s in bed when the door chimes, and before he can ask who it is, Rodney’s already barreling into the room. Jesus. It’s déjà vu all over again.
“Look, Rodney. I’m sorry,” he says, slowly getting to his feet.
“No.No.No.No.No.” Rodney’s shaking his head briskly, a finger in John’s face. “You,” and Rodney punctuates this by poking him in the chest, “no longer get a vote.” And then he’s wrapping a hand around the back of John’s neck and kissing him, kissing him like he means it, lips and tongue and a little bit of teeth, wet and hot and electric, and lasting for seven days.
When he finally pulls back, John gasps and stutters, and makes a last grasp at control of the situation. “Rodney - Rodney, we both know it doesn’t work that way. You can’t just -“
“No. More. Vote,” says Rodney, pushing him up against the wall with a hand to his chest. And then, Sweet Jesus, he’s dropping to his knees, taking John’s boxers with him. And John doesn’t expect it to be any good, but it doesn’t matter. A mouth on his cock is kind of the most amazing thing ever at this point. But, god almighty, Rodney McKay is giving him possibly the best blowjob he’s ever received. And John has a moment to be briefly annoyed that Rodney has to be such a prodigy at every damned thing, before he’s coming, tipped over the edge and falling forever.
When he comes back to himself he’s seized with a new kind of conviction. And if they’re going to do this, then they’re going to do it right. Rodney’s still on his knees, licking his lips with an air of intense concentration. John hauls him to his feet and manhandles him to the bed, where he strips them efficiently of the rest of their clothing.
“Is this what you want?” he asks, as he slowly grinds the entire length of his naked body against Rodney’s, grasping his forearms and pinning them above his head.
“Yes! Jesus, finally,” Rodney groans, as John brushes his hip against Rodney’s cock.
Grinning, John dips his head to take Rodney’s earlobe between his teeth, blowing hot, moist air down Rodney’s neck, which obligingly breaks out into goose bumps. He licks his way down to the collarbone, and takes the time to suck hard at the thin skin right above the bone, causing Rodney to curse and arch off the bed. Then he’s skimming his hands over Rodney’s chest, circling both nipples with his thumbs until they’re hard and flushed dark pink, pressing his fingers to each rib, licking a broad trail down to Rodney’s belly button.
John spreads Rodney’s legs, pressing his face against his inner thigh, kissing, and breathing and sucking until Rodney’s writhing and yelling at him, and red all the way from his ears down to the middle of his chest. And then John slides up Rodney’s body again, wrapping one hand around Rodney’s cock and the other around the back of Rodney’s head, because he wants to watch, he wants to watch Rodney when he comes. And it’s just like he remembers it.
“Are you sure that’s the first time you’ve ever done that?” he asks Rodney later when they’re lying in bed.
And Rodney flushes and looks away. “I, uh, may have been practicing with the - with the turat fruit.”
The turat fruit? And John starts laughing, and he can’t stop, snorting and wheezing as Rodney hits him repeatedly with a pillow, laughing and laughing until he’s crying, grabbing Rodney hard around the middle, jamming his face into Rodney’s neck, laughing and crying, crying and hiccoughing, until he gasps to a stop.
He wants to apologize for the wet spot on Rodney’s neck, and his new and disturbing tendency towards hysteria, but when he tries to move, Rodney just tightens his hold, pressing John closer with a strong hand to the back of his head, another between his shoulder blades.
And John doesn’t fight, because this is where he wants to be.