2nd Sparky Santa fic: "Quid Pro Quo"
Title: Quid Pro Quo
Receiver: theladymore
Request: Body Swap Fic (I always wanted to see what would happen if they switched bodies for a day and sorry it’s not christmasey Im Jewish)
Did not want: As long as there's no death and men getting pregnant I'm good =D
Word count: 2076.
Authors Notes: Written for sparky_santa, I hope you enjoy theladymore!
*_*_*_*
John Sheppard was tired. Gut wrenchingly, bone achingly, mind numbingly tired. The mission they had just returned from had been long and arduous and Elizabeth had grilled them hard at their debrief and insisted Carson check them out before heading to bed. Of course, Rodney had insisted that he be seen to first because his blood sugar was dipping dangerously low and he needed to head to the mess before he passed out. Or fainted as Colonel Sheppard had gleefully pointed out was the correct medical terminology. Entering his quarters, he stripped off his boots, shirt, trousers and socks and fell in to his bed, grumbling to himself as he awkwardly maneuvered himself under the covers. Before succumbing to his slumber, he reached over to his bedside and caressed the stone that partnered the smooth, grey stone he had given Elizabeth for her last birthday. He heaved a heavy sigh and flopped back on to his mattress. He didn’t want to ever leave this bed.
*_*_*_*
The first thing that came to John’s mind as he slowly woke up was that he felt incredibly uncomfortable. He felt like he was lying on something and squashing it, but he couldn’t figure out how it related to his current sleeping position. As he went to move from lying on his front, with his arm crossed underneath him and his face smooushed into the pillow, John recognised that his arm was actually in contact with something quite firm, yet fleshy.
He blinked groggily and leant over to his bedside table to check the alarm clock which had been custom made for all the members of the expedition which now ran for 26 hours. 06:27 it read. ‘What on earth am I doing awake at this hour? I only got into bed four hours ago!’ he thought to himself, dropping back down on to his side to try and get some sleep.
He was just beginning to doze off when his alarm clock shrilly announced it was 06:30 and time to get up. He glared at the insufferable machine before dropping his hand on top of its snooze button heavily. Sighing again, he rolled on to his back and stared up at the ceiling, giving in to the idea that he wasn’t getting anymore sleep tonight. He rubbed his face with his hands and ran his hands through his hair.
His thick. Curly. Long Hair.
Pulling his hands away from his face, he examined them carefully. They were hands he knew, quite well actually since he had spent many an hour watching them lying serenely on the table during meetings, waving around during de-briefings or grasping the handle of a coffee mug while trying to stay awake late at night.
Blinking heavily, he sat up, trying to clear his head as he took stock of his situation. He looked over to his left, where his alarm clock should be but found its spot vacant. Instead it was replaced with a hairbrush that was definitely not his own, a bottle of the perfume he had bought as a present for her last birthday and a nail file. On the opposite side of the bed was an alarm clock and a bottle of clear nail varnish. He carefully tossed aside the lavender bedclothes and stood, making his way over to the mirror and rubbing his eyes to clear them.
Thinking he had simply randomly slept walked and fallen asleep in her bed, he took a deep sigh and looked up at the mirror, expecting to see himself as usual.
What he actually saw had him agog and aghast in shock. So much so that it took him a few seconds to realise that the noise invading the silence of the room over his own heart thumping was a man’s voice over he headset on the floor beside the bed.
He scrambled across the room and put the earpiece in his ear, acknowledging he was listening.
“John Sheppard! What the hell did you touch this time?!”
*_*_*_*
Carson flicked his gaze between the two leaders of Atlantis, somewhere between shock and amusement. Of all the places he expected John Sheppard to get into trouble, it wasn’t here on Atlantis. That was more Rodney’s penchant, but as he watched John and Elizabeth bickering over who touched what (a conversation which, out of context, sounded wrong) and whose fault it was they were in this mess, Carson couldn’t help but wish that it were Rodney here instead. He may well have been a hypochondriac, but he could at least be ‘tamed’ with some medical attention. These two just argued like an old married couple.
When they had explained what they had woken up to this morning he almost couldn’t believe it. Until Elizabeth had tried to run her hand through her hair like Sheppard did and he watched John standing stiffly next to him, arms folded with a stern look on her face. He suddenly knew for sure they had swapped bodies. Without a shadow of a doubt, they were acting completely out of character for them.
“Oh God! What if this can’t be undone?” Elizabeth cried.
“Oh relax would you? Carson can fix anything,” John reassured her, the annoyed tone still present in his voice. They both turned to look at Carson expectantly, leaving him gaping like a goldfish in reply.
“Carson?” Elizabeth asked, worried.
“Errm…let me get you both under the scanner and I’ll, err…I’ll see what I can…see,” he stammered with an awkward smile and led them over to the scanner. They seemed to quieten down after that, with John worriedly watching Elizabeth as she lay under the scanner. Or more accurately he.
“Well? What’s the prognosis Doc?” Elizabeth’s voice with John’s speech pattern shook him out of his reverie.
“Do you see anything?” Elizabeth in John’s body asked.
“Yeah, it feels weird in here,” John told Beckett, looking sheepish as Elizabeth, in his own body, turned to look at him with a strange look on her…his face.
“Sheppard?” she asked. “What have you been doing in my body?”
“Nothing!” he protested, keeping his eyes studiously on the floor and his own fidgeting feet.
“John!”
“What?! I haven’t done anything!” he defended himself.
“The blush creeping up your neck would suggest otherwise, my dear,” Carson chuckled. His face fell as John, in Elizabeth’s body glared at him and he had the sense to look at him apologetically.
“Just remember who you’re talking to there, Doc!” Sheppard told him slowly before returning his attention to Elizabeth. “Besides, tell me that when you got my body dressed this morning you didn’t sneak a peek!” An answering blush covered her neck and her mouth dropped in shock as she thought about how to possibly reply. “See? See?” John crowed triumphantly, an odd sight in Elizabeth’s body.
“All right, you two,” Carson intervened, saving Elizabeth the indignity of replying as he stepped between the two of them to draw their attention to him as he moved in front of the information screen. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with either of you physically, I think this is a case for Rodney I’m afraid,” Carson explained, seeing them share a look of reluctant acceptance. He nodded and walked away, opening a radio channel, “Rodney, I need you in the infirmary, lad, and trust me, you’re not going to want to miss this!”
*_*_*_*
Once Rodney had stopped laughing, helped mostly by a sharp clip around the ear from Sheppard, he quickly deduced what the source of the problem was. It had occurred to him while he had them repeat what they had done respectively before they went to sleep. They had both mentioned a smooth stone which they touched before going to sleep and when he had them show it to him, Rodney had realised that he had in fact used these stones before. These Ancient communication stones were smaller and more decorative than the others he had used, but as soon as he had examined them he knew how to put things right.
He took them down to his lab along with the stones and placed the devices on the SGC’s version of the Ancient communications tablet.
“Well, I guess this is it?” Elizabeth said to John quietly as they stood side by side.
“Yeah, guess so,” John muttered. “Look, about earlier, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s ok, really, let’s just put this behind us, chalk it up to…curiosity and leave it at that.”
“Oh…ok, sure,” he replied, sounding a little regretful. It was ridiculous, but John could have sworn he felt tears pricking at the corners of his eye. They had swapped bodies for only a few hours, but he was on the verge of crying over her apparent rejection of the experience. He shook his head and pushed down the lump in his throat to try and shake the feeling.
After a few moments of silence while Rodney busied himself at a computer, Elizabeth piped up, “Out of curiosity…when you said before about ‘feeling weird in there’, what did you mean?”
“Oh, y’know, my hand-eye co-ordination is all out of whack, I can’t tell if I’m hungry or got stomach-ache, my limbs feel…I don’t know, lighter somehow, like picking up a box and it’s not as heavy as you thought,” he explained. “You?”
She chuffed a laugh, “The opposite, I feel heavier…and your legs are longer than I imagined too, I keep tripping up steps.” They chuckled together, the tension over the utter weirdness of their situation easing slightly. “So did you?” she asked, coyly.
“Did I what?”
“Y’know…” her gaze flicked down to his chest and she quirked a little smile before gazing into his eyes.
“Ohh…well…”
“Ready!” Rodney called proudly and pressed the initialise button.
The world blacked out.
*_*_*_*
“Hey, wake up sleepyhead,” Elizabeth could hear a gravelly voice in the distance a she slowly woke up. She groaned and licked her dry lips, turning away from the light, she found herself facing Dr Beckett. “Yo, Doc, she awake?”
“Aye, Colonel, I think she’s getting there,” the concern in Carson’s voice eased slightly and she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Dr Weir? Are you awake?”
She groaned and rubbed a hand clumsily over her face, “Getting there, what’s wrong Carson?”
“Nothing, love, just wanting to give you a once over, check for any side effects from you know what,” he told her lightly, holding her eye lid open and shining a penlight in it. She pushed him away in irritation and he sighed, “We’ll get you under the scanner when you’re feeling a bit more awake.” He walked away and pulled the privacy curtain halfway round the bed behind him.
“How come she gets off easy, Doc?” Sheppard’s voice complained from her left. She turned her head to glare at him where he sat on the neighbouring bed and suddenly leant up on her elbows, looking incredibly cute from John Sheppard’s perspective; all tousled and grumpy. “What?”
“You’re…you again,” she stated, then looked down and brought a hand up to her chest. “And I’m me.”
“You needed tangible proof, huh?” Sheppard teased with a chuckle as he nodded down to her hand still resting on her chest.
She sent a glare his direction and rested back down on the bed with a relieved sigh, “Please, tell me you didn’t do the same.”
“Never said I didn’t,” he hopped off the bed with a grin and approached her bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired, still a little disorientated,” she told him. “You?”
“I was at first, been awake about an hour now,” he told her. “We were out for nearly a day, y’know.”
“And Rodney didn’t burn the city down?” she joked. He chuckled and rocked on the balls of his feet with his hands in his pocket, looking a little awkward. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Laughing again, he cast his eyes skyward, before replying with a grin and meandering towards the door, “Let me put it this way, I’ve never been the one putting a bra on before.” She could feel the blush rising up her neck as she laughed and he stopped at the door, “Quid pro quo, Clarice.”
“I like your cartoon boxers,” she told him, nuzzling in to the pillow as she prepared to doze off. He started to leave but caught her last little remark, “Definitely look better than that thong in your underwear drawer.”
*_*_*_*
Receiver: theladymore
Request: Body Swap Fic (I always wanted to see what would happen if they switched bodies for a day and sorry it’s not christmasey Im Jewish)
Did not want: As long as there's no death and men getting pregnant I'm good =D
Word count: 2076.
Authors Notes: Written for sparky_santa, I hope you enjoy theladymore!
*_*_*_*
John Sheppard was tired. Gut wrenchingly, bone achingly, mind numbingly tired. The mission they had just returned from had been long and arduous and Elizabeth had grilled them hard at their debrief and insisted Carson check them out before heading to bed. Of course, Rodney had insisted that he be seen to first because his blood sugar was dipping dangerously low and he needed to head to the mess before he passed out. Or fainted as Colonel Sheppard had gleefully pointed out was the correct medical terminology. Entering his quarters, he stripped off his boots, shirt, trousers and socks and fell in to his bed, grumbling to himself as he awkwardly maneuvered himself under the covers. Before succumbing to his slumber, he reached over to his bedside and caressed the stone that partnered the smooth, grey stone he had given Elizabeth for her last birthday. He heaved a heavy sigh and flopped back on to his mattress. He didn’t want to ever leave this bed.
*_*_*_*
The first thing that came to John’s mind as he slowly woke up was that he felt incredibly uncomfortable. He felt like he was lying on something and squashing it, but he couldn’t figure out how it related to his current sleeping position. As he went to move from lying on his front, with his arm crossed underneath him and his face smooushed into the pillow, John recognised that his arm was actually in contact with something quite firm, yet fleshy.
He blinked groggily and leant over to his bedside table to check the alarm clock which had been custom made for all the members of the expedition which now ran for 26 hours. 06:27 it read. ‘What on earth am I doing awake at this hour? I only got into bed four hours ago!’ he thought to himself, dropping back down on to his side to try and get some sleep.
He was just beginning to doze off when his alarm clock shrilly announced it was 06:30 and time to get up. He glared at the insufferable machine before dropping his hand on top of its snooze button heavily. Sighing again, he rolled on to his back and stared up at the ceiling, giving in to the idea that he wasn’t getting anymore sleep tonight. He rubbed his face with his hands and ran his hands through his hair.
His thick. Curly. Long Hair.
Pulling his hands away from his face, he examined them carefully. They were hands he knew, quite well actually since he had spent many an hour watching them lying serenely on the table during meetings, waving around during de-briefings or grasping the handle of a coffee mug while trying to stay awake late at night.
Blinking heavily, he sat up, trying to clear his head as he took stock of his situation. He looked over to his left, where his alarm clock should be but found its spot vacant. Instead it was replaced with a hairbrush that was definitely not his own, a bottle of the perfume he had bought as a present for her last birthday and a nail file. On the opposite side of the bed was an alarm clock and a bottle of clear nail varnish. He carefully tossed aside the lavender bedclothes and stood, making his way over to the mirror and rubbing his eyes to clear them.
Thinking he had simply randomly slept walked and fallen asleep in her bed, he took a deep sigh and looked up at the mirror, expecting to see himself as usual.
What he actually saw had him agog and aghast in shock. So much so that it took him a few seconds to realise that the noise invading the silence of the room over his own heart thumping was a man’s voice over he headset on the floor beside the bed.
He scrambled across the room and put the earpiece in his ear, acknowledging he was listening.
“John Sheppard! What the hell did you touch this time?!”
*_*_*_*
Carson flicked his gaze between the two leaders of Atlantis, somewhere between shock and amusement. Of all the places he expected John Sheppard to get into trouble, it wasn’t here on Atlantis. That was more Rodney’s penchant, but as he watched John and Elizabeth bickering over who touched what (a conversation which, out of context, sounded wrong) and whose fault it was they were in this mess, Carson couldn’t help but wish that it were Rodney here instead. He may well have been a hypochondriac, but he could at least be ‘tamed’ with some medical attention. These two just argued like an old married couple.
When they had explained what they had woken up to this morning he almost couldn’t believe it. Until Elizabeth had tried to run her hand through her hair like Sheppard did and he watched John standing stiffly next to him, arms folded with a stern look on her face. He suddenly knew for sure they had swapped bodies. Without a shadow of a doubt, they were acting completely out of character for them.
“Oh God! What if this can’t be undone?” Elizabeth cried.
“Oh relax would you? Carson can fix anything,” John reassured her, the annoyed tone still present in his voice. They both turned to look at Carson expectantly, leaving him gaping like a goldfish in reply.
“Carson?” Elizabeth asked, worried.
“Errm…let me get you both under the scanner and I’ll, err…I’ll see what I can…see,” he stammered with an awkward smile and led them over to the scanner. They seemed to quieten down after that, with John worriedly watching Elizabeth as she lay under the scanner. Or more accurately he.
“Well? What’s the prognosis Doc?” Elizabeth’s voice with John’s speech pattern shook him out of his reverie.
“Do you see anything?” Elizabeth in John’s body asked.
“Yeah, it feels weird in here,” John told Beckett, looking sheepish as Elizabeth, in his own body, turned to look at him with a strange look on her…his face.
“Sheppard?” she asked. “What have you been doing in my body?”
“Nothing!” he protested, keeping his eyes studiously on the floor and his own fidgeting feet.
“John!”
“What?! I haven’t done anything!” he defended himself.
“The blush creeping up your neck would suggest otherwise, my dear,” Carson chuckled. His face fell as John, in Elizabeth’s body glared at him and he had the sense to look at him apologetically.
“Just remember who you’re talking to there, Doc!” Sheppard told him slowly before returning his attention to Elizabeth. “Besides, tell me that when you got my body dressed this morning you didn’t sneak a peek!” An answering blush covered her neck and her mouth dropped in shock as she thought about how to possibly reply. “See? See?” John crowed triumphantly, an odd sight in Elizabeth’s body.
“All right, you two,” Carson intervened, saving Elizabeth the indignity of replying as he stepped between the two of them to draw their attention to him as he moved in front of the information screen. “There is absolutely nothing wrong with either of you physically, I think this is a case for Rodney I’m afraid,” Carson explained, seeing them share a look of reluctant acceptance. He nodded and walked away, opening a radio channel, “Rodney, I need you in the infirmary, lad, and trust me, you’re not going to want to miss this!”
*_*_*_*
Once Rodney had stopped laughing, helped mostly by a sharp clip around the ear from Sheppard, he quickly deduced what the source of the problem was. It had occurred to him while he had them repeat what they had done respectively before they went to sleep. They had both mentioned a smooth stone which they touched before going to sleep and when he had them show it to him, Rodney had realised that he had in fact used these stones before. These Ancient communication stones were smaller and more decorative than the others he had used, but as soon as he had examined them he knew how to put things right.
He took them down to his lab along with the stones and placed the devices on the SGC’s version of the Ancient communications tablet.
“Well, I guess this is it?” Elizabeth said to John quietly as they stood side by side.
“Yeah, guess so,” John muttered. “Look, about earlier, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s ok, really, let’s just put this behind us, chalk it up to…curiosity and leave it at that.”
“Oh…ok, sure,” he replied, sounding a little regretful. It was ridiculous, but John could have sworn he felt tears pricking at the corners of his eye. They had swapped bodies for only a few hours, but he was on the verge of crying over her apparent rejection of the experience. He shook his head and pushed down the lump in his throat to try and shake the feeling.
After a few moments of silence while Rodney busied himself at a computer, Elizabeth piped up, “Out of curiosity…when you said before about ‘feeling weird in there’, what did you mean?”
“Oh, y’know, my hand-eye co-ordination is all out of whack, I can’t tell if I’m hungry or got stomach-ache, my limbs feel…I don’t know, lighter somehow, like picking up a box and it’s not as heavy as you thought,” he explained. “You?”
She chuffed a laugh, “The opposite, I feel heavier…and your legs are longer than I imagined too, I keep tripping up steps.” They chuckled together, the tension over the utter weirdness of their situation easing slightly. “So did you?” she asked, coyly.
“Did I what?”
“Y’know…” her gaze flicked down to his chest and she quirked a little smile before gazing into his eyes.
“Ohh…well…”
“Ready!” Rodney called proudly and pressed the initialise button.
The world blacked out.
*_*_*_*
“Hey, wake up sleepyhead,” Elizabeth could hear a gravelly voice in the distance a she slowly woke up. She groaned and licked her dry lips, turning away from the light, she found herself facing Dr Beckett. “Yo, Doc, she awake?”
“Aye, Colonel, I think she’s getting there,” the concern in Carson’s voice eased slightly and she felt a hand on her shoulder. “Dr Weir? Are you awake?”
She groaned and rubbed a hand clumsily over her face, “Getting there, what’s wrong Carson?”
“Nothing, love, just wanting to give you a once over, check for any side effects from you know what,” he told her lightly, holding her eye lid open and shining a penlight in it. She pushed him away in irritation and he sighed, “We’ll get you under the scanner when you’re feeling a bit more awake.” He walked away and pulled the privacy curtain halfway round the bed behind him.
“How come she gets off easy, Doc?” Sheppard’s voice complained from her left. She turned her head to glare at him where he sat on the neighbouring bed and suddenly leant up on her elbows, looking incredibly cute from John Sheppard’s perspective; all tousled and grumpy. “What?”
“You’re…you again,” she stated, then looked down and brought a hand up to her chest. “And I’m me.”
“You needed tangible proof, huh?” Sheppard teased with a chuckle as he nodded down to her hand still resting on her chest.
She sent a glare his direction and rested back down on the bed with a relieved sigh, “Please, tell me you didn’t do the same.”
“Never said I didn’t,” he hopped off the bed with a grin and approached her bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Tired, still a little disorientated,” she told him. “You?”
“I was at first, been awake about an hour now,” he told her. “We were out for nearly a day, y’know.”
“And Rodney didn’t burn the city down?” she joked. He chuckled and rocked on the balls of his feet with his hands in his pocket, looking a little awkward. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Laughing again, he cast his eyes skyward, before replying with a grin and meandering towards the door, “Let me put it this way, I’ve never been the one putting a bra on before.” She could feel the blush rising up her neck as she laughed and he stopped at the door, “Quid pro quo, Clarice.”
“I like your cartoon boxers,” she told him, nuzzling in to the pillow as she prepared to doze off. He started to leave but caught her last little remark, “Definitely look better than that thong in your underwear drawer.”
*_*_*_*