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.fic: Invariance - McKay/Sheppard, Sheppard/Weir (R/NC17) 1.1
Title: Invariance
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard (sort of); ref. Sheppard/Weir
Ratings/Warnings: Rish/NC17ish. Angst.
Spoilers: Takes place some time between "Grace Under Pressure" (with references to that ep.) and "Allies."
Disclaimers: Not mine.
Advertisements: Grows out of The Exclusion Principle, which will not only give you a clearer understanding of what's going on, but will also whiten your teeth and expand your mind. Coincidentally answers![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
wordclaim50 challenge #4, "Angst," though it was written for other purposes.
Notes: I've been toying with a follow-up to "The Exclusion Principle" for a couple weeks, but haven't been able to get anything to cohere until... well, just now, actually. Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lillyjk, on the occasion of her birthday.
INVARIANCE
Zelenka’s watching him.
His glasses magnify his eyes, turning them into giant fish-orbs that make Zelenka’s attempts at disguising the fact he’s watching Rodney completely useless. Wide and nervous, they settle on Rodney long enough to annoy him and make him look up before skittering back to the diagnostics Zelenka’s supposed to be running.
What is it? Rodney hisses after ten minutes of Zelenka’s pretending not to watch him. Elizabeth’s one room over, and he doesn’t want her to hear him shouting.
“Nothing.” Zelenka retreats to another workstation, muttering to himself in Czech.
“And I am not a petty, evil man,” Rodney adds, more loudly. He doesn’t turn around to see if Elizabeth’s listening through the glass window of her office.
“I didn’t say you were,” Zelenka says, fish eyes wide and innocent behind his glasses.
“How do I know you weren’t?”
Zelenka frowns at him and says the shield diagnostics have checked out and he’s going to get coffee, and the way he says it makes it clear that he’s not going to bring Rodney any.
Punishing Radek for the disaster that has been Rodney’s life for the past few days – the past few months, if Rodney’s honest with himself – isn’t making him feel any better. Not only has it failed to alleviate the irritation and indecision spiking through him, it means he’s going to have to wait until Radek returns so he can go to the commissary and get breakfast.
He supposes it’s also not fair, because none of this is Radek’s fault, but the people he wants to snap at are either his superior or recovering from a severe concussion, and so he can’t.
The techs and assistants hover a respectful distance away, eyes riveted to their work stations, very pointedly Not Looking at him, and this annoys Rodney as much as Zelenka’s staring. He considers shouting at them, but shouting at his assistants is like kicking puppies – and besides, Elizabeth’s in her office right behind the glass, and she’d hear him. He’s taken a strange sort of pride in restraining his temper whenever he’s around her, though it means exploding at people – like Zelenka – later.
Rodney turns back to his computer with a scowl, tries to lose himself in his equations. Most of the time it works, like listening to good music – there’s a flow to them, an inevitability he loves and wishes he could experience more often – but this time... not so much. Thoughts of Elizabeth and thoughts of John break in, unpleasant variations in the symmetry of thought, and he’s going to scream. Yes. Scream, God help him, because that’s obviously the only thing that’s going to –
A hand holding a mug of coffee materializes in front of him. Rodney stares at it dumbly for a moment before following the arm attached to said hand, up and up to see Radek looking down at him.
“Thanks,” he says, taking the mug and feeling – if possible – even worse than he did one minute ago, too tired suddenly to scream or do anything except look at the steam and breathe it in.
“Don’t mention it,” Radek says.
* * *
He had to admit that, for a fake scientist, Carson knew what he was doing. Forceps to peel off the sloppy bandage – dried blood flaked off, collecting on the rim of John’s ear, larger crusts disintegrating as they fell – and two seconds to say the wound wasn’t infected. Rodney stared helplessly at John’s body lying there on the table, shirt cut away to reveal new bruises and cuts, old scars Rodney had memorized months ago.
“I’m more concerned about his head and neck,” Carson told them distractedly as he looked at a set of readouts Rodney couldn’t understand.
“Yeah... he... I had him in the second pilot’s chair.” Not a memory he cared to relive, glancing over every thirty seconds to see if John was still alive. He still wasn’t quite convinced of it, even though he could see the heart monitor measuring out the steady pulse of John’s heart.
“You had him sitting up, Rodney?” Elizabeth asked.
“I had to watch him and fix the stupid ship at the same time, Dr. Weir.” Rodney leaned heavily on the doctor and was gratified when Elizabeth frowned, relieved that his fear had manifested itself in testiness. “And I’m sorry, but I’m an astrophysicist, not Florence Nightingale.”
“It’s okay,” Carson said, voice soothing and speaking more to Rodney’s fear than Elizabeth’s criticism. “His concussion is pretty nasty, but it will heal. He’ll have to stay in a neck brace for a time as well, as a precaution.”
“Brain damage?”
“I don’t think so, Elizabeth.” Carson smiled slightly, the reassuring smile he put on whenever he was about to tell someone he or she would probably not die, but he still wasn’t sure. “We won’t know for sure until he wakes up; I want to keep him sedated until I can assess the rest of his injuries.”
“Keep me updated,” Elizabeth said. Didn’t even wait for Carson to acknowledge the order, just strode out of the infirmary, boots sounding swift and purposeful on the metal.
“I, uh... I should, you know, get going too. Zelenka... the puddle jumper... We have diagnostics and... and things.”
“Of course,” Carson said, as though Rodney’s stammering was lucid explanation. “You’re welcome to stay though, if you want. I’m sure Radek has everything under control.”
“No... I really need to get going,” Rodney said, because he really did – had to get the hell out of here, had to stay, and fuck fuck fuck he didn’t know what he had to do. Something other than stare down at John and his unconscious self, but if he looked away then maybe John would just up and die after all, and after everything Rodney had done to get the two of them back alive it would just figure. “Diagnostics.”
“You should sleep for a bit, Rodney. You’ve had two rough days of it and you need the rest.”
Rough three months was more like it, but Rodney didn’t tell Carson that, only nodded obediently and left to go... some place.
* * *
He doesn’t like the fact that, even though John hasn’t really been part of his life for months beyond missions and movie night, John’s still there, an unpleasant invariance in the makeup of Rodney’s world. It doesn’t matter that he’d systematically and carefully avoided going to the infirmary for the two days John spent in it, or made sure to be in his lab – where John almost never goes – or parts of the city he knows John isn’t allowed to go while recovering.
They’ve fixed the puddle jumper, stupid worthless piece of Ancient crap that it is, and Rodney doesn’t have anything to do anymore. He goes out with Teyla and Ronon on the occasional mission, because they’re his team and he’s supposed to go, and while both of them are competent – more than, really – Rodney’s on edge the entire time they’re off-world.
And when they take one of the puddle jumpers, Rodney listens for the subaural groan of a broken engine casing, the beginnings of the shudder that means hull integrity is about to go.
Today he’s looking at ways to augment shield strength, because you can never have too much shield strength, the lab techs off on their own projects, Teyla and Ronon off with a replacement scientist on a trading mission. Rodney doesn’t feel like cheating death in the name of finding some edible alien root, so he’s here.
Equations. Yes. First, figuring out how much extra energy the shield generators can take without overloading, and then figuring out how much of said extra energy they can spare from the ZPM. Then figuring out if shield strength increases enough to make expending the extra energy worth it.
His report’s due to Elizabeth in the afternoon. He tries not to think about that, though he toys with the idea of submitting it an hour after Elizabeth is off-shift. But this is an issue of The Safety of Atlantis – Rodney can practically hear Elizabeth saying this, staring at him as though the force of her gaze can drill the words into his head – and thus should not be used as weapon in Rodney’s silent, personal (and – he knows this at some level he doesn’t want to think about – probably one-sided) war.
Despite the deadline and the computers that can do them in a nanosecond, he works the equations out by hand. They’re fairly simple, straightforward calculations of energy and force despite the technology they’re supposed to measure, and he sort of – okay, he does – like writing them out, symbols and numbers indecipherable to most of the rest of the world, something like a private language. His own private world, sitting here with his assistants working nearby, a sanctuary.
He’s gotten to the calculations for field strength and is hovering between concentration and the rapt sort of pleasure that comes with the numbers doing what he needs, flowing along with them in something like meditation, when he becomes aware of the silence.
Not the silence of working, which isn’t really silence at all, but a dead, heavy silence.
Rodney opens his mouth to tell the peons get back to work, looks up, and the words die in his mouth.
John’s there, standing over his desk, looking down at him, eyes dark with something Rodney can’t identify.
That he might once have been able to only makes it worse.
* * *
His bedroom, his turf, and he was standing there hovering like the self-conscious idiot he was.
John had been in here before, of course, usually barging in to haul Rodney off on some mind-bendingly dangerous mission, or make him watch football with a collection of steaming military-types. He was moving around now, though, as though he’d never seen the place before, a slow, methodical inspection.
Like the way he moved over Rodney’s body not much later, mouth on his shoulder and hands traveling downward, pausing here and there – his nipples, curve of ribs, his stomach (which makes Rodney shiver and John laugh) – always moving lower, one encouraging Rodney’s legs apart, sliding down thigh and calf, the other –
Couldn’t stop the sharp thrust up, completely out of his control, or the gasp that John smothered with his mouth. Long fingers played over the length of his cock, down his inner thighs, John’s fingers and palms callused by a life of fighting, rough skin against smooth and Rodney was most sincerely certain he was either going to come or die. Maybe both.
He must have said something, though he couldn’t understand it, because John laughed, though it wasn’t teasing like it usually was, not what Rodney was expecting. When he found breath and coherence enough he opened his eyes – he’d had to close them, the only way to deal with how it felt having John pressed against him – and John’s eyes were wide and nearly black, not the green-grey Rodney was used to seeing, darkened with something that made Rodney breathless again.
Then John was kissing him, hands busy again, moving faster and with purpose, and Rodney did what he had pretty much never done with anyone, and went with it.
* * *
Rodney is very, tremendously, immeasurably relieved they’re in the privacy of his office and the assistants are all taking an early lunch. A very early lunch, because it’s barely past 1000. The silence is the same though, terrible and awkward, like a weight pressing down, but Rodney’s not sure if talking wouldn’t be worse.
“So, how’ve you been?”
Deceptively light, casual, the way John’s voice gets when he’s really annoyed.
“Good. I’ve been good.” Rodney congratulates himself that he can meet John’s eyes. Narrow and still dark, thin line between them a sign of pain, though one of John’s fake smiles is playing around his lips. “And busy,” Rodney adds. “Very busy. Increasing shield strength, fixing the puddle jumper...” He makes himself stop before he can start rambling.
Which he will, he knows, any minute now.
And this seals it. Talking? Definitely worse.
“That’s nice.” John folds his hands atop his stomach, leaning back in his chair as he does so. He doesn’t get far before he winces and straightens, his neck obviously protesting the movement. Rodney forces himself not to look away.
“You want to know how I’ve been?” John asks. It’s not really a question.
“Um... How have you been?” Rodney doesn’t really want to know, but figures saying that wouldn’t be polite. It would be dangerous because, neck brace or not, John can probably kill him.
“Not so hot. A concussion and whiplash will do that to a person.” Watching him closely and Rodney knows he can’t keep his face blank – he never can, never could – and he wonders what John’s seeing.
“Teyla filled me in on what happened when they picked us up.” John laces and unlaces his fingers, doesn’t look away from Rodney though. “What I don’t know is what happened between when that guy hit me and when they found us. I also don’t know why I haven’t seen you at all the past three days, but we’ll get to that in a minute.”
Rodney can’t tell him the second thing, doesn’t want to tell him the first, but John’s not going to let this go, and so he starts talking.
Words start slow, come faster when he realizes he can’t keep them back.
* * *
The thirty or so seconds the ship needed to break free of the planet’s orbit were also the thirty seconds the engines needed to overload and shut down automatically. But they were alive for now, and in a way the engines shutting down was a good thing – they’d live a bit longer. Two or three hours, by Rodney’s estimation.
He knew he should go to the back compartment and try to milk a little more time out of the life support system, but he couldn’t move. Too much fear, which given his life lately he should have been used to by now, but he found he couldn’t deal with the thought of the two of them dying and being unable to do anything to stop it.
John fell asleep again after a few minutes, though Rodney tried to keep him awake – not good to have a person with a concussion fall asleep, because they might not ever wake up and he thought furiously that it would be just like Sheppard to up and die after Rodney went through all the trouble of saving his life.
Eventually he did go to the rear compartment, but couldn’t concentrate on the readouts on his screen. Too tired, he decided, too tired to even care about staying alive long enough for Teyla and Ronon to find them. He absently flicked through the figures the diagnostic program had pulled up, remembering the last time he’d stood in a puddle jumper like this, surrounded by tangles of wires and fragments of crystal.
When he’d been stuck underwater, half-drowned and nearly dead, and the jumper’s hull creaking under the strain of a thousand feet of ocean.
He closed his eyes, thought Oh God, please, not that.
Or, if that, he hoped Sam would come again.
* * *
“You were unconscious until... well, until you woke up in sickbay, I guess.” Rodney collapses into silence, hoping John will take what he’s offered – that John had helped him with the maneuvers to get out of the planet’s gravitational influence and had lost consciousness shortly thereafter. (John doesn’t remember this, for which Rodney is grateful.) His attempts to clamp down on panic, to banish the memories of nearly drowning and tell himself that’s not going to happen it never did happen and it’s not happening this time... Those he doesn’t say. Those are his, not John’s.
John nods meditatively. “Haven’t seen you around much lately.”
“Like I said, I’ve been busy. Elizabeth wants the figures on the shield generator – ”
“She told me,” John says softly, actually sounding contrite and under any circumstances other than these, Rodney would be pleased. “She also wanted me to talk to you, find out what’s wrong. She said you were pretty shaken up.”
“Yeah, well, near-death experiences tend to do that to people.”
John inclines his head slightly, something like a nod.
“Look, I have to finish this – ” Rodney gestures to his desk, his laptop, the Big Important Vital Work that he does so he doesn’t have to think about John all the time.
“Okay,” John says softly. Pulls himself to his feet and walks out, just like that.
* * *
Broken symmetry. That’s the closest he could come to describing what it was like in the early days, the sense that there was an order there before an outside force came and broke it apart. In physics, it was a matter of finding the symmetry, the invariance, hidden under seeming disorder, that came before it.
He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, and he didn’t even know what it was. A breakup? Were you allowed to break up when you had no idea if you and your partner were actually partners? Because he couldn’t answer that question, Rodney let it go. Let John go, and it sort of galled him that he’d given up like that.
But again: what had he given up? John? They were friends. Who slept together. Occasionally. Five times before John and Zelenka had pulled Rodney out from the bottom of the ocean, not once since. That didn’t count as a relationship, Rodney supposed, though he knew he wasn’t an expert in that particular area and he certainly wasn’t going to go around asking anyone for advice.
It didn’t help that Elizabeth treated him as though nothing had happened – still friendly, slightly formal, unexpected flashes of humor in their briefing sessions. He wondered if she knew about himself and John, wondered what the hell there was to know in the first place.
Wondered when the hell he’d turned into a melodramatic schoolgirl, and resolved from then on not to think about JohnandElizabeth.
His resolve lasted until John fell, blood over half his face and all down Rodney’s jacket sleeve, and Rodney had half-carried, half-dragged him into the puddle jumper. And the moment he’d realized the planet’s inhabitants had somehow sabotaged the puddle jumper, he’d realized he wasn’t as resolute as he’d thought, that JohnandElizabeth still hurt more than it should, and he was probably never going to tell John that, ever.
* * *
He avoids John for a few more days, but not without receiving a lecture from Elizabeth about the importance of team members getting along, and if he and John have a problem they need to work it out and on and on and on and on and Rodney snaps something back at her, mid-rant, about how you’re imagining things, Elizabeth, and don’t you have better things to be doing?
It’s weak as a comeback, but Elizabeth's lecture freezes in its tracks and she lets him go once he points out that, while she may not have better things to do, he does.
Today he and Zelenka are working on the long-range sensors, experimenting with improving their range. It’s painstaking work, and he does need the computers for this. And he does need to be awake, too, though his recent lack of sleep is making the being awake difficult.
Radek is infinitely patient, taking on most of the work and keeping the assistants away. Rodney should thank him, but doing that would be the same as acknowledging he’s having issues lately.
“Why don’t you get some coffee?” Radek says after a couple hours. It’s not really a suggestion, more like an order, though Radek doesn’t do the whole authority thing very well.
Still, Rodney finds himself moving in the general direction of the commissary, mind tangled up in the equations and the newest set of sensor information and the past few days and months and the whole mess. He’s trying to sort some of it out as he walks through the door and sees John sitting at a table, hands around a cup of something, looking at him.
Rodney forces himself to casualness as he picks up his mug and heads back out the door.
John follows him.
Rodney keeps walking, walking as thought John’s not trailing him like a shadow, down hallways and up stairs, moving with no clear goal other than to exasperate John to the point that he gives up and goes away.
He finds himself on one of the balconies some distance from the control room. Some distance from where most people are this time of day. The breeze is gentle and the sea sighs beneath them, waves washing against the outer piers, nothing like the devouring monster Rodney knows it is.
“So,” John says, coming up to stand beside him. He leans carefully against the railing but his gaze is steady as he looks at Rodney.
“So what?” Rodney asks testily.
“Elizabeth talked to me this morning and says there’s something going on with you but you won’t talk to her about it.” John shrugs. “She asked me to try.”
“What are you, my shrink?” Rodney takes a gulp of coffee – not wise, insulated mug keeping the coffee a few fractions of a degree under boiling.
John waits until he stops coughing to answer.
“Well, I thought we were sort of friends.”
And what the hell can he say to that? Well, you thought wrong? Part of him, the nasty vengeful (petty) part, wants very badly to say that, but he manages to silence it. And, for possibly the first time in his life, Rodney McKay decides that silence is golden and says nothing at all.
“I never said thank you...” John trails off for a moment. “You know, for saving my ass again, on that planet.”
“Don’t mention it.” Please, John, don’t.
“Who would have thought a bunch of Iron Age-civilization people would be able to sabotage a jumper? I mean, I didn’t.”
Rodney can’t stop the smile, because it had been sort of funny. Funny in a sick, perverse kind of way, but still funny. Out of the corner of his eye – because he is very determinedly not looking at John – he can see that John is smiling. It makes him feel good, though he knows it shouldn’t, seeing John smile for the first time in... In a long time, Rodney realizes.
“When we talked the other day, and I said that I hadn’t seen you lately?” Trepidation in John’s voice, something Rodney definitely isn’t used to hearing. He’s never associated John with hesitation before, and he has to look up, sees that John’s trying to feel his way through this much as Rodney is.
“When we talked,” John continues after a moment, “I meant that I hadn’t seen you a lot since the jumper crash, you know, in the ocean... And, well, I guess some of that’s my fault.”
“How exactly?”
John shrugs and looks away. “It just... Fuck.” Curse punctuated with a slight, cautious shake of John’s head, movement limited by the brace. “That freaked the hell out of me, I guess.”
“We’ve had hundreds of near-death experiences before,” Rodney reminds him, because it’s true. He wonders why this one would be different, doesn’t dare ask, can feel – even though he’s never been good at reading people, who aren’t like equations at all – a change in the conversation, a tide shifting.
“Didn’t know if Zelenka and I were going to get to you in time,” John says. “And, even when we did... You know, Carson said you could have died from hypothermia. It was pretty close.”
“I’m okay,” Rodney points out. Which he really isn’t, because he can’t think about those hours without shivering from remembered cold, feeling blood cool into stickiness on his forehead. “Hundred percent. Really.”
The look John gives him tells Rodney John doesn’t believe him at all.
“You know, I’ve lost a lot of friends in combat – you sort of get used to it.” John’s staring into his coffee mug now, steam no longer rising from it. “Well, you don’t get used to it so much as you get used to dealing with it.” Slow, exasperated breath. “But when we were looking for you... Not knowing is almost worse, I guess. Fuck, hell, I don’t know.”
“And this is relevant how?” Not particularly nice, but John’s thrown him off his game, badly. This is light years away from their routine of teasing and insulting each other in between saving each other’s life and Rodney can’t deal with something other than what he’s used to.
“I don’t know,” John says after a moment. “Just that it is.”
“And Elizabeth?”
John shrugs again. “I don’t know that, either. Easier, maybe. She’s not going anywhere, you know?”
“What, and I am?”
“You almost did, Rodney.”
“Yeah, well, you almost did, too.”
“But I didn’t.”
“And I didn’t either.” He’s not sure if he’s angry or not, or if the difficulty of the past few months has somehow made it impossible to tell how or what he’s supposed to be feeling.
“Yeah, I guess you didn’t.” Hint of John’s old rueful smile now, the kind Rodney likes on him. “For what it’s worth, Elizabeth and I... She’s pretty lonely. Hard being at the top and all.”
“And what, you were trying to help her?”
“You know how I said I talked to her this morning? She told me she felt like she was taking advantage.” Smile truer now, bordering on real, slight twist of John’s lips that Rodney also likes.
"Does she know?" Rodney asks, though he doesn't want to know the answer.
"I don't think so," John says. "I didn't tell her anything."
And, Rodney supposes, it was only five times. What's there to tell? Unexpectedly bitter thought, and some of that bitterness must have shown on his face, because John turns to face him more fully, and there's something on his face like regret, or hope, and what the hell he's hoping for, Rodney has no idea.
“I’m not asking for anything, Rodney,” John says, somber and shading into something different, serious in a way that catches Rodney’s attention, holds it while John searches for more words. “But it would be kind of cool if you watched football with me tonight. Steelers, Cowboys, Super Bowl XIII.”
“You already know who won,” Rodney complains. “Isn’t the tape worn out by now?”
“One of the best Super Bowls of all time,” John reminds him. “I’ll bring popcorn.”
“Well, okay,” Rodney says, unwillingly because he knows from long experience that he’s supposed to be reluctant and John has to coerce him into watching his endless football tapes.
“Well, okay,” John says.
-end-
In other news: Yay! I got my kink/cliche prompts! *cheers*
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard (sort of); ref. Sheppard/Weir
Ratings/Warnings: Rish/NC17ish. Angst.
Spoilers: Takes place some time between "Grace Under Pressure" (with references to that ep.) and "Allies."
Disclaimers: Not mine.
Advertisements: Grows out of The Exclusion Principle, which will not only give you a clearer understanding of what's going on, but will also whiten your teeth and expand your mind. Coincidentally answers
wordclaim50 challenge #4, "Angst," though it was written for other purposes.Notes: I've been toying with a follow-up to "The Exclusion Principle" for a couple weeks, but haven't been able to get anything to cohere until... well, just now, actually. Written for
lillyjk, on the occasion of her birthday.INVARIANCE
Zelenka’s watching him.
His glasses magnify his eyes, turning them into giant fish-orbs that make Zelenka’s attempts at disguising the fact he’s watching Rodney completely useless. Wide and nervous, they settle on Rodney long enough to annoy him and make him look up before skittering back to the diagnostics Zelenka’s supposed to be running.
What is it? Rodney hisses after ten minutes of Zelenka’s pretending not to watch him. Elizabeth’s one room over, and he doesn’t want her to hear him shouting.
“Nothing.” Zelenka retreats to another workstation, muttering to himself in Czech.
“And I am not a petty, evil man,” Rodney adds, more loudly. He doesn’t turn around to see if Elizabeth’s listening through the glass window of her office.
“I didn’t say you were,” Zelenka says, fish eyes wide and innocent behind his glasses.
“How do I know you weren’t?”
Zelenka frowns at him and says the shield diagnostics have checked out and he’s going to get coffee, and the way he says it makes it clear that he’s not going to bring Rodney any.
Punishing Radek for the disaster that has been Rodney’s life for the past few days – the past few months, if Rodney’s honest with himself – isn’t making him feel any better. Not only has it failed to alleviate the irritation and indecision spiking through him, it means he’s going to have to wait until Radek returns so he can go to the commissary and get breakfast.
He supposes it’s also not fair, because none of this is Radek’s fault, but the people he wants to snap at are either his superior or recovering from a severe concussion, and so he can’t.
The techs and assistants hover a respectful distance away, eyes riveted to their work stations, very pointedly Not Looking at him, and this annoys Rodney as much as Zelenka’s staring. He considers shouting at them, but shouting at his assistants is like kicking puppies – and besides, Elizabeth’s in her office right behind the glass, and she’d hear him. He’s taken a strange sort of pride in restraining his temper whenever he’s around her, though it means exploding at people – like Zelenka – later.
Rodney turns back to his computer with a scowl, tries to lose himself in his equations. Most of the time it works, like listening to good music – there’s a flow to them, an inevitability he loves and wishes he could experience more often – but this time... not so much. Thoughts of Elizabeth and thoughts of John break in, unpleasant variations in the symmetry of thought, and he’s going to scream. Yes. Scream, God help him, because that’s obviously the only thing that’s going to –
A hand holding a mug of coffee materializes in front of him. Rodney stares at it dumbly for a moment before following the arm attached to said hand, up and up to see Radek looking down at him.
“Thanks,” he says, taking the mug and feeling – if possible – even worse than he did one minute ago, too tired suddenly to scream or do anything except look at the steam and breathe it in.
“Don’t mention it,” Radek says.
He had to admit that, for a fake scientist, Carson knew what he was doing. Forceps to peel off the sloppy bandage – dried blood flaked off, collecting on the rim of John’s ear, larger crusts disintegrating as they fell – and two seconds to say the wound wasn’t infected. Rodney stared helplessly at John’s body lying there on the table, shirt cut away to reveal new bruises and cuts, old scars Rodney had memorized months ago.
“I’m more concerned about his head and neck,” Carson told them distractedly as he looked at a set of readouts Rodney couldn’t understand.
“Yeah... he... I had him in the second pilot’s chair.” Not a memory he cared to relive, glancing over every thirty seconds to see if John was still alive. He still wasn’t quite convinced of it, even though he could see the heart monitor measuring out the steady pulse of John’s heart.
“You had him sitting up, Rodney?” Elizabeth asked.
“I had to watch him and fix the stupid ship at the same time, Dr. Weir.” Rodney leaned heavily on the doctor and was gratified when Elizabeth frowned, relieved that his fear had manifested itself in testiness. “And I’m sorry, but I’m an astrophysicist, not Florence Nightingale.”
“It’s okay,” Carson said, voice soothing and speaking more to Rodney’s fear than Elizabeth’s criticism. “His concussion is pretty nasty, but it will heal. He’ll have to stay in a neck brace for a time as well, as a precaution.”
“Brain damage?”
“I don’t think so, Elizabeth.” Carson smiled slightly, the reassuring smile he put on whenever he was about to tell someone he or she would probably not die, but he still wasn’t sure. “We won’t know for sure until he wakes up; I want to keep him sedated until I can assess the rest of his injuries.”
“Keep me updated,” Elizabeth said. Didn’t even wait for Carson to acknowledge the order, just strode out of the infirmary, boots sounding swift and purposeful on the metal.
“I, uh... I should, you know, get going too. Zelenka... the puddle jumper... We have diagnostics and... and things.”
“Of course,” Carson said, as though Rodney’s stammering was lucid explanation. “You’re welcome to stay though, if you want. I’m sure Radek has everything under control.”
“No... I really need to get going,” Rodney said, because he really did – had to get the hell out of here, had to stay, and fuck fuck fuck he didn’t know what he had to do. Something other than stare down at John and his unconscious self, but if he looked away then maybe John would just up and die after all, and after everything Rodney had done to get the two of them back alive it would just figure. “Diagnostics.”
“You should sleep for a bit, Rodney. You’ve had two rough days of it and you need the rest.”
Rough three months was more like it, but Rodney didn’t tell Carson that, only nodded obediently and left to go... some place.
He doesn’t like the fact that, even though John hasn’t really been part of his life for months beyond missions and movie night, John’s still there, an unpleasant invariance in the makeup of Rodney’s world. It doesn’t matter that he’d systematically and carefully avoided going to the infirmary for the two days John spent in it, or made sure to be in his lab – where John almost never goes – or parts of the city he knows John isn’t allowed to go while recovering.
They’ve fixed the puddle jumper, stupid worthless piece of Ancient crap that it is, and Rodney doesn’t have anything to do anymore. He goes out with Teyla and Ronon on the occasional mission, because they’re his team and he’s supposed to go, and while both of them are competent – more than, really – Rodney’s on edge the entire time they’re off-world.
And when they take one of the puddle jumpers, Rodney listens for the subaural groan of a broken engine casing, the beginnings of the shudder that means hull integrity is about to go.
Today he’s looking at ways to augment shield strength, because you can never have too much shield strength, the lab techs off on their own projects, Teyla and Ronon off with a replacement scientist on a trading mission. Rodney doesn’t feel like cheating death in the name of finding some edible alien root, so he’s here.
Equations. Yes. First, figuring out how much extra energy the shield generators can take without overloading, and then figuring out how much of said extra energy they can spare from the ZPM. Then figuring out if shield strength increases enough to make expending the extra energy worth it.
His report’s due to Elizabeth in the afternoon. He tries not to think about that, though he toys with the idea of submitting it an hour after Elizabeth is off-shift. But this is an issue of The Safety of Atlantis – Rodney can practically hear Elizabeth saying this, staring at him as though the force of her gaze can drill the words into his head – and thus should not be used as weapon in Rodney’s silent, personal (and – he knows this at some level he doesn’t want to think about – probably one-sided) war.
Despite the deadline and the computers that can do them in a nanosecond, he works the equations out by hand. They’re fairly simple, straightforward calculations of energy and force despite the technology they’re supposed to measure, and he sort of – okay, he does – like writing them out, symbols and numbers indecipherable to most of the rest of the world, something like a private language. His own private world, sitting here with his assistants working nearby, a sanctuary.
He’s gotten to the calculations for field strength and is hovering between concentration and the rapt sort of pleasure that comes with the numbers doing what he needs, flowing along with them in something like meditation, when he becomes aware of the silence.
Not the silence of working, which isn’t really silence at all, but a dead, heavy silence.
Rodney opens his mouth to tell the peons get back to work, looks up, and the words die in his mouth.
John’s there, standing over his desk, looking down at him, eyes dark with something Rodney can’t identify.
That he might once have been able to only makes it worse.
His bedroom, his turf, and he was standing there hovering like the self-conscious idiot he was.
John had been in here before, of course, usually barging in to haul Rodney off on some mind-bendingly dangerous mission, or make him watch football with a collection of steaming military-types. He was moving around now, though, as though he’d never seen the place before, a slow, methodical inspection.
Like the way he moved over Rodney’s body not much later, mouth on his shoulder and hands traveling downward, pausing here and there – his nipples, curve of ribs, his stomach (which makes Rodney shiver and John laugh) – always moving lower, one encouraging Rodney’s legs apart, sliding down thigh and calf, the other –
Couldn’t stop the sharp thrust up, completely out of his control, or the gasp that John smothered with his mouth. Long fingers played over the length of his cock, down his inner thighs, John’s fingers and palms callused by a life of fighting, rough skin against smooth and Rodney was most sincerely certain he was either going to come or die. Maybe both.
He must have said something, though he couldn’t understand it, because John laughed, though it wasn’t teasing like it usually was, not what Rodney was expecting. When he found breath and coherence enough he opened his eyes – he’d had to close them, the only way to deal with how it felt having John pressed against him – and John’s eyes were wide and nearly black, not the green-grey Rodney was used to seeing, darkened with something that made Rodney breathless again.
Then John was kissing him, hands busy again, moving faster and with purpose, and Rodney did what he had pretty much never done with anyone, and went with it.
Rodney is very, tremendously, immeasurably relieved they’re in the privacy of his office and the assistants are all taking an early lunch. A very early lunch, because it’s barely past 1000. The silence is the same though, terrible and awkward, like a weight pressing down, but Rodney’s not sure if talking wouldn’t be worse.
“So, how’ve you been?”
Deceptively light, casual, the way John’s voice gets when he’s really annoyed.
“Good. I’ve been good.” Rodney congratulates himself that he can meet John’s eyes. Narrow and still dark, thin line between them a sign of pain, though one of John’s fake smiles is playing around his lips. “And busy,” Rodney adds. “Very busy. Increasing shield strength, fixing the puddle jumper...” He makes himself stop before he can start rambling.
Which he will, he knows, any minute now.
And this seals it. Talking? Definitely worse.
“That’s nice.” John folds his hands atop his stomach, leaning back in his chair as he does so. He doesn’t get far before he winces and straightens, his neck obviously protesting the movement. Rodney forces himself not to look away.
“You want to know how I’ve been?” John asks. It’s not really a question.
“Um... How have you been?” Rodney doesn’t really want to know, but figures saying that wouldn’t be polite. It would be dangerous because, neck brace or not, John can probably kill him.
“Not so hot. A concussion and whiplash will do that to a person.” Watching him closely and Rodney knows he can’t keep his face blank – he never can, never could – and he wonders what John’s seeing.
“Teyla filled me in on what happened when they picked us up.” John laces and unlaces his fingers, doesn’t look away from Rodney though. “What I don’t know is what happened between when that guy hit me and when they found us. I also don’t know why I haven’t seen you at all the past three days, but we’ll get to that in a minute.”
Rodney can’t tell him the second thing, doesn’t want to tell him the first, but John’s not going to let this go, and so he starts talking.
Words start slow, come faster when he realizes he can’t keep them back.
The thirty or so seconds the ship needed to break free of the planet’s orbit were also the thirty seconds the engines needed to overload and shut down automatically. But they were alive for now, and in a way the engines shutting down was a good thing – they’d live a bit longer. Two or three hours, by Rodney’s estimation.
He knew he should go to the back compartment and try to milk a little more time out of the life support system, but he couldn’t move. Too much fear, which given his life lately he should have been used to by now, but he found he couldn’t deal with the thought of the two of them dying and being unable to do anything to stop it.
John fell asleep again after a few minutes, though Rodney tried to keep him awake – not good to have a person with a concussion fall asleep, because they might not ever wake up and he thought furiously that it would be just like Sheppard to up and die after Rodney went through all the trouble of saving his life.
Eventually he did go to the rear compartment, but couldn’t concentrate on the readouts on his screen. Too tired, he decided, too tired to even care about staying alive long enough for Teyla and Ronon to find them. He absently flicked through the figures the diagnostic program had pulled up, remembering the last time he’d stood in a puddle jumper like this, surrounded by tangles of wires and fragments of crystal.
When he’d been stuck underwater, half-drowned and nearly dead, and the jumper’s hull creaking under the strain of a thousand feet of ocean.
He closed his eyes, thought Oh God, please, not that.
Or, if that, he hoped Sam would come again.
“You were unconscious until... well, until you woke up in sickbay, I guess.” Rodney collapses into silence, hoping John will take what he’s offered – that John had helped him with the maneuvers to get out of the planet’s gravitational influence and had lost consciousness shortly thereafter. (John doesn’t remember this, for which Rodney is grateful.) His attempts to clamp down on panic, to banish the memories of nearly drowning and tell himself that’s not going to happen it never did happen and it’s not happening this time... Those he doesn’t say. Those are his, not John’s.
John nods meditatively. “Haven’t seen you around much lately.”
“Like I said, I’ve been busy. Elizabeth wants the figures on the shield generator – ”
“She told me,” John says softly, actually sounding contrite and under any circumstances other than these, Rodney would be pleased. “She also wanted me to talk to you, find out what’s wrong. She said you were pretty shaken up.”
“Yeah, well, near-death experiences tend to do that to people.”
John inclines his head slightly, something like a nod.
“Look, I have to finish this – ” Rodney gestures to his desk, his laptop, the Big Important Vital Work that he does so he doesn’t have to think about John all the time.
“Okay,” John says softly. Pulls himself to his feet and walks out, just like that.
Broken symmetry. That’s the closest he could come to describing what it was like in the early days, the sense that there was an order there before an outside force came and broke it apart. In physics, it was a matter of finding the symmetry, the invariance, hidden under seeming disorder, that came before it.
He couldn’t pinpoint exactly when it happened, and he didn’t even know what it was. A breakup? Were you allowed to break up when you had no idea if you and your partner were actually partners? Because he couldn’t answer that question, Rodney let it go. Let John go, and it sort of galled him that he’d given up like that.
But again: what had he given up? John? They were friends. Who slept together. Occasionally. Five times before John and Zelenka had pulled Rodney out from the bottom of the ocean, not once since. That didn’t count as a relationship, Rodney supposed, though he knew he wasn’t an expert in that particular area and he certainly wasn’t going to go around asking anyone for advice.
It didn’t help that Elizabeth treated him as though nothing had happened – still friendly, slightly formal, unexpected flashes of humor in their briefing sessions. He wondered if she knew about himself and John, wondered what the hell there was to know in the first place.
Wondered when the hell he’d turned into a melodramatic schoolgirl, and resolved from then on not to think about JohnandElizabeth.
His resolve lasted until John fell, blood over half his face and all down Rodney’s jacket sleeve, and Rodney had half-carried, half-dragged him into the puddle jumper. And the moment he’d realized the planet’s inhabitants had somehow sabotaged the puddle jumper, he’d realized he wasn’t as resolute as he’d thought, that JohnandElizabeth still hurt more than it should, and he was probably never going to tell John that, ever.
He avoids John for a few more days, but not without receiving a lecture from Elizabeth about the importance of team members getting along, and if he and John have a problem they need to work it out and on and on and on and on and Rodney snaps something back at her, mid-rant, about how you’re imagining things, Elizabeth, and don’t you have better things to be doing?
It’s weak as a comeback, but Elizabeth's lecture freezes in its tracks and she lets him go once he points out that, while she may not have better things to do, he does.
Today he and Zelenka are working on the long-range sensors, experimenting with improving their range. It’s painstaking work, and he does need the computers for this. And he does need to be awake, too, though his recent lack of sleep is making the being awake difficult.
Radek is infinitely patient, taking on most of the work and keeping the assistants away. Rodney should thank him, but doing that would be the same as acknowledging he’s having issues lately.
“Why don’t you get some coffee?” Radek says after a couple hours. It’s not really a suggestion, more like an order, though Radek doesn’t do the whole authority thing very well.
Still, Rodney finds himself moving in the general direction of the commissary, mind tangled up in the equations and the newest set of sensor information and the past few days and months and the whole mess. He’s trying to sort some of it out as he walks through the door and sees John sitting at a table, hands around a cup of something, looking at him.
Rodney forces himself to casualness as he picks up his mug and heads back out the door.
John follows him.
Rodney keeps walking, walking as thought John’s not trailing him like a shadow, down hallways and up stairs, moving with no clear goal other than to exasperate John to the point that he gives up and goes away.
He finds himself on one of the balconies some distance from the control room. Some distance from where most people are this time of day. The breeze is gentle and the sea sighs beneath them, waves washing against the outer piers, nothing like the devouring monster Rodney knows it is.
“So,” John says, coming up to stand beside him. He leans carefully against the railing but his gaze is steady as he looks at Rodney.
“So what?” Rodney asks testily.
“Elizabeth talked to me this morning and says there’s something going on with you but you won’t talk to her about it.” John shrugs. “She asked me to try.”
“What are you, my shrink?” Rodney takes a gulp of coffee – not wise, insulated mug keeping the coffee a few fractions of a degree under boiling.
John waits until he stops coughing to answer.
“Well, I thought we were sort of friends.”
And what the hell can he say to that? Well, you thought wrong? Part of him, the nasty vengeful (petty) part, wants very badly to say that, but he manages to silence it. And, for possibly the first time in his life, Rodney McKay decides that silence is golden and says nothing at all.
“I never said thank you...” John trails off for a moment. “You know, for saving my ass again, on that planet.”
“Don’t mention it.” Please, John, don’t.
“Who would have thought a bunch of Iron Age-civilization people would be able to sabotage a jumper? I mean, I didn’t.”
Rodney can’t stop the smile, because it had been sort of funny. Funny in a sick, perverse kind of way, but still funny. Out of the corner of his eye – because he is very determinedly not looking at John – he can see that John is smiling. It makes him feel good, though he knows it shouldn’t, seeing John smile for the first time in... In a long time, Rodney realizes.
“When we talked the other day, and I said that I hadn’t seen you lately?” Trepidation in John’s voice, something Rodney definitely isn’t used to hearing. He’s never associated John with hesitation before, and he has to look up, sees that John’s trying to feel his way through this much as Rodney is.
“When we talked,” John continues after a moment, “I meant that I hadn’t seen you a lot since the jumper crash, you know, in the ocean... And, well, I guess some of that’s my fault.”
“How exactly?”
John shrugs and looks away. “It just... Fuck.” Curse punctuated with a slight, cautious shake of John’s head, movement limited by the brace. “That freaked the hell out of me, I guess.”
“We’ve had hundreds of near-death experiences before,” Rodney reminds him, because it’s true. He wonders why this one would be different, doesn’t dare ask, can feel – even though he’s never been good at reading people, who aren’t like equations at all – a change in the conversation, a tide shifting.
“Didn’t know if Zelenka and I were going to get to you in time,” John says. “And, even when we did... You know, Carson said you could have died from hypothermia. It was pretty close.”
“I’m okay,” Rodney points out. Which he really isn’t, because he can’t think about those hours without shivering from remembered cold, feeling blood cool into stickiness on his forehead. “Hundred percent. Really.”
The look John gives him tells Rodney John doesn’t believe him at all.
“You know, I’ve lost a lot of friends in combat – you sort of get used to it.” John’s staring into his coffee mug now, steam no longer rising from it. “Well, you don’t get used to it so much as you get used to dealing with it.” Slow, exasperated breath. “But when we were looking for you... Not knowing is almost worse, I guess. Fuck, hell, I don’t know.”
“And this is relevant how?” Not particularly nice, but John’s thrown him off his game, badly. This is light years away from their routine of teasing and insulting each other in between saving each other’s life and Rodney can’t deal with something other than what he’s used to.
“I don’t know,” John says after a moment. “Just that it is.”
“And Elizabeth?”
John shrugs again. “I don’t know that, either. Easier, maybe. She’s not going anywhere, you know?”
“What, and I am?”
“You almost did, Rodney.”
“Yeah, well, you almost did, too.”
“But I didn’t.”
“And I didn’t either.” He’s not sure if he’s angry or not, or if the difficulty of the past few months has somehow made it impossible to tell how or what he’s supposed to be feeling.
“Yeah, I guess you didn’t.” Hint of John’s old rueful smile now, the kind Rodney likes on him. “For what it’s worth, Elizabeth and I... She’s pretty lonely. Hard being at the top and all.”
“And what, you were trying to help her?”
“You know how I said I talked to her this morning? She told me she felt like she was taking advantage.” Smile truer now, bordering on real, slight twist of John’s lips that Rodney also likes.
"Does she know?" Rodney asks, though he doesn't want to know the answer.
"I don't think so," John says. "I didn't tell her anything."
And, Rodney supposes, it was only five times. What's there to tell? Unexpectedly bitter thought, and some of that bitterness must have shown on his face, because John turns to face him more fully, and there's something on his face like regret, or hope, and what the hell he's hoping for, Rodney has no idea.
“I’m not asking for anything, Rodney,” John says, somber and shading into something different, serious in a way that catches Rodney’s attention, holds it while John searches for more words. “But it would be kind of cool if you watched football with me tonight. Steelers, Cowboys, Super Bowl XIII.”
“You already know who won,” Rodney complains. “Isn’t the tape worn out by now?”
“One of the best Super Bowls of all time,” John reminds him. “I’ll bring popcorn.”
“Well, okay,” Rodney says, unwillingly because he knows from long experience that he’s supposed to be reluctant and John has to coerce him into watching his endless football tapes.
“Well, okay,” John says.
-end-
In other news: Yay! I got my kink/cliche prompts! *cheers*