Wingfic Conclusion: The Rise and Fall
I'm so weak.
Title: The Rise and Fall
Sequel to: The Man Who Rose From Earth and Flux
Rating: PG
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Length: 2100 words
Summary: This is nothing like what happened to John.
The Rise and Fall
When they first realize what’s happening, they lock him up. They’re afraid he’s going to do what John did. Disappear.
But this is nothing like what happened to John. For John it was fast, quick: a flash of light and change. This, though: this is days of Rodney face down on the infirmary mattress, fisting the sheets as they work their way through the skin of his back, as they burst free.
He hates John more than just a little. Because he gave Rodney a choice-a choice he himself didn’t have-and Rodney wasn’t smart enough to understand it. To-to-
To reject it, he’s sure.
Then it’s done. He sleeps-for days, he sleeps. Face down (of course), and well, though he’s awakened every once in a while by an unfamiliar sensation: the breeze across his back, through his-through the feathers.
Finally he wakes, and wakes rested. Restless. He paces around the locked room, little infirmary cell-they kept Michael in a place like this. He shudders at the thought, shedding feathers. One ghosts gently to the cold floor, and Rodney kneels, picks it up. He runs it carefully over the palm of his hand and has a sudden, intense moment of recognizing it as his. His shoulders straighten, the muscles in his back moving in a new way. He goes up on his toes and-
Oh, God.
He needs to get out.
Once he calms the fluttering in his chest, the feeling that his heart is beating a hundred miles an hour, it’s relatively simple. Some quick fiddling with the door control, and then yes, yes-he’s out in the infirmary proper. There are no standing guards, but he’s willing to bet they were running a security feed and that people are on their way. He runs to a window and throws it open. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Carson, but he doesn’t have time to explain. He needs-to prove this to himself, to prove it to them. A little faith, he thinks, teetering on the edge.
Then he falls.
Ocean, spinning up toward his face. His brain is really, seriously unhappy about this. But for once his body doesn’t let him down: the wings extend automatically, and he feels the clenching of his shoulder muscles, feels himself slowly bearing up, the wind holding him. He’s rising. He still feels nauseated if he looks down, but he doesn’t have to look down. The sky stretches out before him, vast and blue.
He’s flying.
He does one circle of the city, just to prove that he can. The wind whips across his bare chest and through his thin scrub pants, but he doesn’t mind. Not really, not even when his eyes water. Not even when he doesn’t see John, not anywhere, a single dot on the vast horizon.
A single circle of the city: that’s all he needs-all he’ll allow himself. Then he’s swooping gracefully back toward the infirmary window. He can see Carson, head in his hands, explaining himself to an angry Elizabeth; he can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when-
-he gets his entry angle wrong and kind of crashes into a cart of medical supplies. “Ow,” he says; and, “Why’d you put that there? Are you trying to get me killed?”; and, “Are you done gawking now? Good, ‘cause I’d like to get started with the annoying and pointless discussion so that I can finally get back to work.”
The discussion is even more annoying than he imagined. They don’t seem to believe that he doesn’t want to go frolicking through the clouds like a drunken sparrow-to fly away and never come back. They carefully avoid saying John’s name unless they absolutely have to. Just like they all avoided speculating too hard about what led John to bite Rodney-or about what led Rodney to let him.
This pisses Rodney off. “Look,” he says, and has the odd experience of feeling his wings ruffle in annoyance. At first he feared that he looked ridiculous-where John never did-but now he doesn’t care. Carson and Elizabeth aren’t staring at him with anything but a sort of stunned and nervous awe, and hey, he’s used to that. “You can either choose to trust me, or not. If you trust me, I’ll go back to work; I’ll do my job and help this city, which is what I want to do anyway. If you don’t, well, then you can lock me in a cell somewhere, waste my brilliant mind, and hey, most likely die the next time something even remotely threatening occurs. Which, considering the way things go around here leaves you, hm, maybe till Friday?”
He folds his arms and sits back, bumping his wings a little uncomfortably, but holding his position. He looks bored. He is bored.
In the end they let him go back to the lab. He knows they think he’s going to fly away at the earliest opportunity. Well, whatdaya know: that’s why he’s a genius, and they’re not.
That night he stands barefoot on the balcony, his wings extended, tasting the wind. He waits for John until he starts to feel ridiculous and Julietish, and then he stands a moment or two longer, indecisive on his own terms. On the one hand, he should go in and sleep, because he both needs and wants to work tomorrow (and John might still come); on the other, he wants...
It surprises him, that he wants it in a way that has nothing to do with John. It worries him, too: maybe they were right, after all, and it is like a sickness. Infected, the sky will call and call to him, until his own voice cannot form any words but a simple answer, and his feet leave the ground for good.
But he doesn’t believe that about himself. He looks back at his messy room and all his stuff: at the projects he’s working on, and the food he’s snacking on, and the kind of meandering, lazily-played chess game he has going on with Radek. He has no real desire to leave any of that. Or this city. He just wants-
-a break, a moment of weightlessness. The stars spin above and the waves spin below, and he can look down, now, without getting dizzy, but only because he knows solid ground is waiting, that he can touch it again.
Weeks and weeks pass and John doesn’t show. Rodney gets annoyed, and then he gets worried, and then he gets frantic. The other scientists who share his lab (really, he’s trying hard not to think of them as minions) had just started getting used to seeing him perched on his stool again, first in a covering of artfully draped fabric, and then, after he realized that he really couldn’t be bothered and furthermore just didn’t care, shirtless with the wings folded downy against his back. They were just getting used to him, oddly calmed by his sudden bursts of yelling and wing-flapping, and then suddenly, he knew, he was tense and silent again. Unnerving. Unnerved.
He’s sitting awake one night, working out the kinks in a plan to find John that he’s going to propose to Elizabeth in the morning (and if she says no, he’s already decided, he’s going to go anyway, tentative trust be damned) when he hears a familiar footstep, feather-light. He starts up, straining against his natural instincts, the ones that call for flight.
John is standing there, windswept and gorgeous, framed in the balcony doorway.
For a while, neither of them says anything. They just stare.
Then John swallows, slow and painful, tongue working. “I,” he says, “I thought...”
“That I would just leave and come after you?” Rodney snaps, suddenly angry. “Just...drop everything, and...”
“...they locked you away,” John finishes. “That they hurt you.”
It’s actually not too far outside the realm of possibility. For a moment, Rodney doesn’t know what to say. John, seemingly emboldened by a complete sentence, uses the opportunity to press on. “I came, and...”
Rodney waves a hand; this isn’t what he wants to talk about. “They locked me in the infirmary for a while; old news; what I want to know is: how is this supposed to work exactly?”
John blinks at him, very slowly.
“Argh!” says Rodney, flapping up in annoyance. Toes leaving the ground, airborne, he pushes against John’s naked chest. “Has exposure to high altitudes made you stupid? Do you even bother to think anymore, or is the only thing that passes through your brain these days ‘I like to fly-whee!’? Because-what?”
Because: suddenly John’s tongue is moving again, and his chest is heaving. He’s lifted off too-effortlessly-and Rodney realizes that they’re circling each other through the air. Like crazed sparrows, really. But most sparrows don’t let out the kind of undignified snort that John makes, or touch each other’s wings with awed, cautious fingers. “You’re,” John says, “you’re-” the word beautiful lost on an exhale, but no less there, in the air between them. “I missed you.”
It’s nothing more than a scratchy whisper, but Rodney hears it. He stares at John, amazed-which is pretty ridiculous, really, that either of them should be amazed at anything. They’re hovering ten feet above the balcony floor, a couple hundred feet above the splashing waves of the ocean. John is naked, skin like liquid moonlight, and he has great, white wings extending from his back. And Rodney has wings, too. John touches them, gentle and reverent and surprised, in a way that he was never surprised by his own, and Rodney feels it in every feather, feels John’s touch all through his entire body, like a warm wind, like lightning.
“I missed you, too,” he says, as John moves around behind him, sweeps his hands over altered, no longer achy, shoulder blades, and lightly nuzzles Rodney’s neck. Rodney turns and kisses him, and the wings don’t get in the way at all. They make this all possible, Rodney realizes; and more, too.
“Will you come flying with me?” John asks quietly, breath a warm whisper across his neck.
In some ways, it’s a pretty silly question. He’s already left the ground.
But, “Yes,” Rodney says. “Yes, I will.” And he kisses John again, tender and human and slow.
“But first,” he says, drawing back, stuttering a little as he resumes his usual pattern of flapping, away from John’s hold. “Will you come have something to eat with me? I want pie.”
“Pie,” says John, pronouncing the word slowly.
“Yes, pie,” says Rodney. “I don’t know what you’ve been eating, and frankly, I don’t want to know. I want a slice of pecan pie.”
“Pie?” John says, his eyes lighting up slowly, like he’s remembering something long forgotten.
“A la mode,” says Rodney, drawing him over the rail.
Inside, Rodney spends several minutes convincing John to put on a pair of loose hospital scrubs, and John spends several minutes kissing Rodney fiercely, until Rodney almost throws in the towel-and chucks both their pants along with it. But in the end it’s John who pulls back, who tilts his head and blinks and says, “Pie?” questioningly. And Rodney nods and John nods more slowly in return, kissing the point where Rodney’s right wing extends from his bare back, where there’s the slight red blush of a scar, one that perfectly fits his lips.
They go down to the mess together, and John walks almost the entire way.
It’s late, but Atlantis is a city of night owls, so there are still a few people, scattered around the tables. Their heads come up when John and Rodney enter the room: they stare. Rodney feels John tense at his side, feels the beating of his wings and the moment where his feet leave the ground. But Rodney stays standing, and he never lets go of John’s hand.
One of the Marines, sitting with his own slice of pie forgotten in front of him, sucks in a hitching breath and starts to cry. Slow, shocked tears, dripping down his face, over the curve of his lips. Over his smile.
John is still above him. Rodney can feel every breath he expels ruffling his feathers and the hair on top of his head. But as they move forward, slow steps and soft wingbeats, the gusts of air move lower and lower on Rodney’s neck, until Rodney chances a look over to find that their eyes are almost level.
When Rodney lets his heels leave the ground, when he rises up on his toes, they are.
And that’s it! No more wingfic for me! Ever!
(This has been an interesting experiment, though. Off-the-cuff writing. What did you think?)
Title: The Rise and Fall
Sequel to: The Man Who Rose From Earth and Flux
Rating: PG
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Length: 2100 words
Summary: This is nothing like what happened to John.
The Rise and Fall
When they first realize what’s happening, they lock him up. They’re afraid he’s going to do what John did. Disappear.
But this is nothing like what happened to John. For John it was fast, quick: a flash of light and change. This, though: this is days of Rodney face down on the infirmary mattress, fisting the sheets as they work their way through the skin of his back, as they burst free.
He hates John more than just a little. Because he gave Rodney a choice-a choice he himself didn’t have-and Rodney wasn’t smart enough to understand it. To-to-
To reject it, he’s sure.
Then it’s done. He sleeps-for days, he sleeps. Face down (of course), and well, though he’s awakened every once in a while by an unfamiliar sensation: the breeze across his back, through his-through the feathers.
Finally he wakes, and wakes rested. Restless. He paces around the locked room, little infirmary cell-they kept Michael in a place like this. He shudders at the thought, shedding feathers. One ghosts gently to the cold floor, and Rodney kneels, picks it up. He runs it carefully over the palm of his hand and has a sudden, intense moment of recognizing it as his. His shoulders straighten, the muscles in his back moving in a new way. He goes up on his toes and-
Oh, God.
He needs to get out.
Once he calms the fluttering in his chest, the feeling that his heart is beating a hundred miles an hour, it’s relatively simple. Some quick fiddling with the door control, and then yes, yes-he’s out in the infirmary proper. There are no standing guards, but he’s willing to bet they were running a security feed and that people are on their way. He runs to a window and throws it open. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Carson, but he doesn’t have time to explain. He needs-to prove this to himself, to prove it to them. A little faith, he thinks, teetering on the edge.
Then he falls.
Ocean, spinning up toward his face. His brain is really, seriously unhappy about this. But for once his body doesn’t let him down: the wings extend automatically, and he feels the clenching of his shoulder muscles, feels himself slowly bearing up, the wind holding him. He’s rising. He still feels nauseated if he looks down, but he doesn’t have to look down. The sky stretches out before him, vast and blue.
He’s flying.
He does one circle of the city, just to prove that he can. The wind whips across his bare chest and through his thin scrub pants, but he doesn’t mind. Not really, not even when his eyes water. Not even when he doesn’t see John, not anywhere, a single dot on the vast horizon.
A single circle of the city: that’s all he needs-all he’ll allow himself. Then he’s swooping gracefully back toward the infirmary window. He can see Carson, head in his hands, explaining himself to an angry Elizabeth; he can’t wait to see the looks on their faces when-
-he gets his entry angle wrong and kind of crashes into a cart of medical supplies. “Ow,” he says; and, “Why’d you put that there? Are you trying to get me killed?”; and, “Are you done gawking now? Good, ‘cause I’d like to get started with the annoying and pointless discussion so that I can finally get back to work.”
The discussion is even more annoying than he imagined. They don’t seem to believe that he doesn’t want to go frolicking through the clouds like a drunken sparrow-to fly away and never come back. They carefully avoid saying John’s name unless they absolutely have to. Just like they all avoided speculating too hard about what led John to bite Rodney-or about what led Rodney to let him.
This pisses Rodney off. “Look,” he says, and has the odd experience of feeling his wings ruffle in annoyance. At first he feared that he looked ridiculous-where John never did-but now he doesn’t care. Carson and Elizabeth aren’t staring at him with anything but a sort of stunned and nervous awe, and hey, he’s used to that. “You can either choose to trust me, or not. If you trust me, I’ll go back to work; I’ll do my job and help this city, which is what I want to do anyway. If you don’t, well, then you can lock me in a cell somewhere, waste my brilliant mind, and hey, most likely die the next time something even remotely threatening occurs. Which, considering the way things go around here leaves you, hm, maybe till Friday?”
He folds his arms and sits back, bumping his wings a little uncomfortably, but holding his position. He looks bored. He is bored.
In the end they let him go back to the lab. He knows they think he’s going to fly away at the earliest opportunity. Well, whatdaya know: that’s why he’s a genius, and they’re not.
That night he stands barefoot on the balcony, his wings extended, tasting the wind. He waits for John until he starts to feel ridiculous and Julietish, and then he stands a moment or two longer, indecisive on his own terms. On the one hand, he should go in and sleep, because he both needs and wants to work tomorrow (and John might still come); on the other, he wants...
It surprises him, that he wants it in a way that has nothing to do with John. It worries him, too: maybe they were right, after all, and it is like a sickness. Infected, the sky will call and call to him, until his own voice cannot form any words but a simple answer, and his feet leave the ground for good.
But he doesn’t believe that about himself. He looks back at his messy room and all his stuff: at the projects he’s working on, and the food he’s snacking on, and the kind of meandering, lazily-played chess game he has going on with Radek. He has no real desire to leave any of that. Or this city. He just wants-
-a break, a moment of weightlessness. The stars spin above and the waves spin below, and he can look down, now, without getting dizzy, but only because he knows solid ground is waiting, that he can touch it again.
Weeks and weeks pass and John doesn’t show. Rodney gets annoyed, and then he gets worried, and then he gets frantic. The other scientists who share his lab (really, he’s trying hard not to think of them as minions) had just started getting used to seeing him perched on his stool again, first in a covering of artfully draped fabric, and then, after he realized that he really couldn’t be bothered and furthermore just didn’t care, shirtless with the wings folded downy against his back. They were just getting used to him, oddly calmed by his sudden bursts of yelling and wing-flapping, and then suddenly, he knew, he was tense and silent again. Unnerving. Unnerved.
He’s sitting awake one night, working out the kinks in a plan to find John that he’s going to propose to Elizabeth in the morning (and if she says no, he’s already decided, he’s going to go anyway, tentative trust be damned) when he hears a familiar footstep, feather-light. He starts up, straining against his natural instincts, the ones that call for flight.
John is standing there, windswept and gorgeous, framed in the balcony doorway.
For a while, neither of them says anything. They just stare.
Then John swallows, slow and painful, tongue working. “I,” he says, “I thought...”
“That I would just leave and come after you?” Rodney snaps, suddenly angry. “Just...drop everything, and...”
“...they locked you away,” John finishes. “That they hurt you.”
It’s actually not too far outside the realm of possibility. For a moment, Rodney doesn’t know what to say. John, seemingly emboldened by a complete sentence, uses the opportunity to press on. “I came, and...”
Rodney waves a hand; this isn’t what he wants to talk about. “They locked me in the infirmary for a while; old news; what I want to know is: how is this supposed to work exactly?”
John blinks at him, very slowly.
“Argh!” says Rodney, flapping up in annoyance. Toes leaving the ground, airborne, he pushes against John’s naked chest. “Has exposure to high altitudes made you stupid? Do you even bother to think anymore, or is the only thing that passes through your brain these days ‘I like to fly-whee!’? Because-what?”
Because: suddenly John’s tongue is moving again, and his chest is heaving. He’s lifted off too-effortlessly-and Rodney realizes that they’re circling each other through the air. Like crazed sparrows, really. But most sparrows don’t let out the kind of undignified snort that John makes, or touch each other’s wings with awed, cautious fingers. “You’re,” John says, “you’re-” the word beautiful lost on an exhale, but no less there, in the air between them. “I missed you.”
It’s nothing more than a scratchy whisper, but Rodney hears it. He stares at John, amazed-which is pretty ridiculous, really, that either of them should be amazed at anything. They’re hovering ten feet above the balcony floor, a couple hundred feet above the splashing waves of the ocean. John is naked, skin like liquid moonlight, and he has great, white wings extending from his back. And Rodney has wings, too. John touches them, gentle and reverent and surprised, in a way that he was never surprised by his own, and Rodney feels it in every feather, feels John’s touch all through his entire body, like a warm wind, like lightning.
“I missed you, too,” he says, as John moves around behind him, sweeps his hands over altered, no longer achy, shoulder blades, and lightly nuzzles Rodney’s neck. Rodney turns and kisses him, and the wings don’t get in the way at all. They make this all possible, Rodney realizes; and more, too.
“Will you come flying with me?” John asks quietly, breath a warm whisper across his neck.
In some ways, it’s a pretty silly question. He’s already left the ground.
But, “Yes,” Rodney says. “Yes, I will.” And he kisses John again, tender and human and slow.
“But first,” he says, drawing back, stuttering a little as he resumes his usual pattern of flapping, away from John’s hold. “Will you come have something to eat with me? I want pie.”
“Pie,” says John, pronouncing the word slowly.
“Yes, pie,” says Rodney. “I don’t know what you’ve been eating, and frankly, I don’t want to know. I want a slice of pecan pie.”
“Pie?” John says, his eyes lighting up slowly, like he’s remembering something long forgotten.
“A la mode,” says Rodney, drawing him over the rail.
Inside, Rodney spends several minutes convincing John to put on a pair of loose hospital scrubs, and John spends several minutes kissing Rodney fiercely, until Rodney almost throws in the towel-and chucks both their pants along with it. But in the end it’s John who pulls back, who tilts his head and blinks and says, “Pie?” questioningly. And Rodney nods and John nods more slowly in return, kissing the point where Rodney’s right wing extends from his bare back, where there’s the slight red blush of a scar, one that perfectly fits his lips.
They go down to the mess together, and John walks almost the entire way.
It’s late, but Atlantis is a city of night owls, so there are still a few people, scattered around the tables. Their heads come up when John and Rodney enter the room: they stare. Rodney feels John tense at his side, feels the beating of his wings and the moment where his feet leave the ground. But Rodney stays standing, and he never lets go of John’s hand.
One of the Marines, sitting with his own slice of pie forgotten in front of him, sucks in a hitching breath and starts to cry. Slow, shocked tears, dripping down his face, over the curve of his lips. Over his smile.
John is still above him. Rodney can feel every breath he expels ruffling his feathers and the hair on top of his head. But as they move forward, slow steps and soft wingbeats, the gusts of air move lower and lower on Rodney’s neck, until Rodney chances a look over to find that their eyes are almost level.
When Rodney lets his heels leave the ground, when he rises up on his toes, they are.
And that’s it! No more wingfic for me! Ever!
(This has been an interesting experiment, though. Off-the-cuff writing. What did you think?)