Contour
The orthopedist hasn't looked away from the x-ray film in two minutes, too busy examining the battered shadows of John's knee. John can't make himself look at it; instead, he studies the the diagram of the human skeleton. Those things always freak him out, especially the close-up of the skull with the eye in one socket.
"You need to ease up on the running," the doctor tells him, still looking at the film.
"I'll do that."
"You shouldn't be running at all," the doctor says, and now she's looking at him, like there’s some way to pin her advice into his brain the same way the surgeons pinned together bone.
He fixes his attention on the skeleton, the terrible emptiness under its ribcage, thinks Rodney probably knows all the Latin and Greek on the charts.
Supracondylar femur fracture, though... John knows that one.
Dr. Morris reminds him of that one more time, in case John's forgotten, and when John leaves the office his knee takes over, reminding him on the drive home, his silent trip up the stairs to the bedroom to change, ignoring as he goes Rodney’s indignant, half-muttered complaints about people who disappear for half the day and if you think I’m calling the Coast Guard out for you, Sheppard, you’ve got another - where are you going?, and jogs back out the door.
By the second mile he can’t escape the ache, the burn of something he can’t name that has nothing to do with his knee. Pain sours the salt air on his tongue and the heat laces acid across his skin, and it’s like this entire experiment, these years of thinking the island could help, at least let his wounds scar if they couldn’t heal… nothing, to come back to a place where his body is painful and heavy, ordinary earth.
He walks the two miles back, almost sick with the jump and shudder of the muscles in his abdomen, the sun a sledgehammer on the back of his neck, and what’s splintering inside him has little to do with bone.
* * *
The next two days he spends in the air, better than spending them going crazy or fielding questions from Rodney about what, exactly, has crawled up his ass, died, and started rotting extravagantly. He volunteers to take a couple flights for Nate, whose wife is eight months pregnant and stuck in bed for the duration ("You know how it is," Nate had said, and John said yes, he did, even though he really didn’t), and between his regular charters and those he's picked up his mind can settle a bit, the worst drawn off on the stream of chatter from Logan, and even on the short hops across the Sound his body sheds some of its weight, spinning out into something looser and freer than before.
He comes back down to earth and the heat of an unseasonable summer, to sand gritting underfoot and airplane fuel choking every breath.
"Good flight?" Rick asks while John files his paperwork.
"Yeah," John says, double-checking his flight plan and the invoice before shoving them in their file and handing them to Marcy, who takes them and looks bewildered.
It isn’t the flying that’s the problem.
* * *
It’s two in the morning, and the way he’s been chasing sleep - lame, limping - it’s no wonder he can’t catch it. Even Rodney, who is warm and absolutely still, his breath a rhythm that can usually soothe John into sleep, isn’t helping.
He wants to run, because that’s what he does, only last time it didn’t work out so well and he’d spent almost two weeks feeling like… John frowns up into the darkness, the long-fingered shadow of the ceiling fan. Rodney’s alarm clock blinks a steady red, counting off wakeful minutes while John circles around and around the same thought.
Like this. Not dissatisfaction, not discontent, but what he suspects is his normal response to good things. To a home, to open sky, to Rodney asleep next to him. A hangover, almost, the feeling of waking up on the wrong side of reality, when everything good goes wrong and goes off and crashes like a helicopter falling out of the sky.
It’s almost enough to get him out of bed, out of the house and where the hell would he go on Nantucket at two in the morning anyway, but instead he reaches for Rodney who comes to with a start and a sleepy grunt but lets John roll him over, push his shirt up his chest, to taste warmth and sleep.
He has Rodney pinned to the mattress, forearms bracketing his head, bent close to breathe in sweat and soap and Rodney's desperate breath. Under him Rodney is all firmness, steady although his chest shakes on the inhale and when John cups his hip, rubs his own stubble-rough chin across Rodney's nipple, Rodney shivers.
This is good, this is good he tells himself, licking anxious kisses against Rodney’s mouth, shoulder cresting into the hand Rodney runs over it, careful against sunburnt skin that hasn’t yet resolved into John’s usual tan. This is good when Rodney pushes John’s boxers down his hips and the sheets they’re under slide down John’s back as he moves over, into Rodney and Rodney arches up to meet him.
This is good he tells himself, moaning when Rodney’s hand closes around his cock, and the sheet slides down a little more, and the air runs cold along the tracks of sweat down his naked back.
* * *
No way, no way he’s going to go for a run again, even though it kills him to admit Dr. Morris is right about the running less. They walk Cash in the morning again, like they always do - God, they have a routine, an actual fucking routine - and Rodney talks at length about everything he can think of, weirdly unselfconscious remarks about John’s three-am horniness shading into remarks about Colorado, a paper, the rapid devaluing of the American dollar and the collapse of American postcapitalism, God in heaven what does Cash have in his mouth?
Fortunately, he doesn’t think of what the hell’s wrong with you, Sheppard? And apparently hot, desperate sex hadn’t been enough to shut up what is either the voice of reason or the voice of John’s late-onset psychotic break.
There’s no work today, and no excuse to get out of the house. They’d gone to the store a few days ago and Rodney doesn’t trust John to come back with something that isn’t American cheese or American beer, so John can’t go out unsupervised. The garden is fine, the Wagoneer is fine, Cash and Planck are fine, the house is fine, everything is goddamned fucking fine, Sheppard.
John sweeps, glaring at the gigantic pile of dog and cat hair that’s been fermenting under the couch. Sweeping and dish washing, mindless activities Rodney’s usually very happy to have someone else do, and usually John’s happy to do them if it means distraction. But now… now it’s just frustration, like everything else, and he gives up halfway through and just… just leaves.
He hears Rodney’s hesitant voice behind him, but the door comes between the two of them, and it’s kind of a relief.
The clamshell crunches under his feet, the Wagoneer’s old paint gleams dully. There’s a gull crying somewhere, and the Kaplans’ flag snaps crisply, like a soldier coming to attention. The lawn looks a bit raggedy, crab grass trying to invade, the stems a bit brown at the edges from the salt air.
John comes to the end of the driveway, reflexively checks the mailbox even though he knows Rodney’d brought the mail in earlier. He turns back around, empty-handed, and looks at his square and quiet house.
* * *
When he goes back inside, he collapses on the couch, noting absently that someone’s cleaned up the coating of fur and dust. He can hear Rodney shouting silence in the kitchen, and it occurs to him Rodney’s oblivious but not stupid, and that he’s probably caught on to John’s dissatisfaction, and is wondering, maybe, what now? Or remembering, John thinks (and his stomach knots, a ghost-headache forming behind his temple) the last time John had turned cold, and turned, and ran.
But Rodney comes out of the kitchen a few minutes later, moving with a care that’s surprising to see, even though John knows it shouldn’t be, and sits down next to him. He's wordless, still quiet, mouth thin with unhappiness and the strain of keeping words back, but he’s there, elbows braced on his thighs like how John is sitting, and it makes the line of his shoulder and arm look strong.
Strong enough to hold John, maybe, if he asked.
* * *
That night it’s like before: late, the moon still on the wrong side of the house so there’s nothing but darkness through the windows, the air cool on John’s back and Rodney heat and life under him.
And when he twists his hips, pushing deeper into Rodney, the fabric falls, a smooth whisper, over his ass, down his thighs, and though it tangles awkwardly in his legs, trapped between him and Rodney, he can't kick them aside without breaking rhythm so they're one more thing to feel, mixed up with Rodney under him, the sweat-bright expanse of his shoulders and the sweet, slick glide of his cock in Rodney's body, the anticipation, the coming closer.
John is on Rodney’s lips when he comes, and Rodney’s hands are on John’s shoulders, his neck, his chest, everywhere, pulling him down and in and deep and it’s perfect, so perfect, to turn his face into Rodney’s neck and let Rodney hold him down.
Orgasm knocks him out of himself into whiteness, unknowing - he hears himself whispering Rodney Rodney Rodney but almost doesn't know what the word means - and what brings him back is Rodney pushing at him and saying "I am not lying in the wet spot and your bony carcass weighs a ton, so get off and move over."
Too sated, still too gone to be anything but obedient, John rolls off Rodney and onto his back, stares at the ceiling and the nonsense patterns of dark and less-dark, and the fuzziness at the edge of vision.
Though the air tastes of heat and sex when he drags in a breath, the brush of it across his chest, his belly, is cold, lingering in the sweat that laces over him. He shivers, a full-body twitch of muscle and nerve, and like that Rodney's there, making noises about John's uselessness after sex, pulling the sheets free from their inscrutable knot around John's calves, rescuing the comforter from the foot of the bed.
Despite Rodney's claims to efficiency he takes his time pulling the sheets up, hands awkward and amazed as they pass carefully over John's knee (the busted one Rodney doesn't ask about), up the length of his thigh, his chest, settling there a moment while Rodney regards him with a criticism softened only the slightest bit by afterglow.
"You know," he says as he collapses into the curve of John's torso, "I don't know what you'd do without me."
"Yeah," John agrees, all kinds of warm now: Rodney's legs tangled in his and his jaw evening-rough against John's chest, the two of them wrapped up together, this deep, bright warmth John can't look at. "I don't have a clue, either."
"Of course you don’t." Even when he’s still, Rodney moves, fingers stroking across John’s skin in absent, affectionate patterns. There are words there, John thinks, and offering in Rodney’s usual roundabout way, and Rodney’s shoulder is strong against his, like before.
"I crashed," John says to the dark, to Rodney’s temple. "My knee? I… I crashed."
-end-