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.fic: Cynosure - McKay/Sheppard (NC17) 1.1
Title: Cynosure*
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating/Warnings: NC17
Spoilers: Tag to 3.11 "Return II"
Word count: c. 5,000
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Advertisements: Sequel to Wireless.
Notes: I'm so sorry for the inordinate amount of time this took.. hope it's worth the wait. *fidgety*
CYNOSURE
They’re back, they’re home, and Rodney knows he should be happy.
Because you’re happy when you’ve stared certain death in the face and said, “No, not today, thank you,” and saved a city, your city, saved your friends from a painful introduction to oblivion.
But Rodney doesn’t want happiness, Rodney wants anger, the Rodney smash kind of anger, anger like the enzyme, that focused and intense, because happiness and contentedness haven’t solved anything in the world he knows. They don’t belong with the thrum of adrenaline in his blood, the insomnia he suspects will plague him for the next several weeks. He claws after that anger as he stalks along the corridors near the control tower, leaving his escort of Marines far behind, moving through the emptiness of his labs, angry that they aren’t filled with computers and life, the things and people he needs to function.
He needs to shout at Zelenka, the science team, Sheppard for almost getting himself killed, curse the stupid replicators for breaking something that will take him eons and an inhuman amount of ingenuity to fix. He needs to spend the next several hours venting adrenaline in simulations, the fine, obsessive detail work that can smooth out his thoughts and make them still into a tranquility of diagnostics and algorithms.
But Zelenka’s not here and neither is the science team, and he and John and the rest of them all almost died, twice, once in Rodney’s mind and once in reality.
(No way wild horses or Sheppard or replicators will ever drag out of him the fear of all those variables falling apart, with no time to second-guess them or simulate or project results, everything riding on Wolsey buying the decoy plan, the replicators buying the decoy plan and not mindfucking them all to double-check, the shield-disruptor interface actually working, Caldwell deciding not to blow up Atlantis on principle, O’Neill or no O’Neill.)
The ifs drive him crazy with wondering, because Rodney is the kind of person who has to know what happens in all possible futures – call it too much experience with alternate selves, or too much dabbling in quantum mechanics. And that’s why he needs a project, something to work on, to fix, and that’s why he’s going insane between the adrenaline and disbelief, the mad improbability of being alive.
But the replicators have left the city like new, better than new, practically with a fresh coat of paint and with three, count ‘em, three ZPMs. The city can fly, her shackles off, and God, so much to do, so much work, so little time to do all the things he wants to do.
Okay okay okay, no laptops or interfaces, but he’s good enough at reading Ancient – the technical stuff, in any case, and Elizabeth can have the poetry and the rest of it – that he can work his way through diagnostics without the help anyway, though he’ll need help eventually of course because brilliant as he is he’s just one person, and wow Radek is going to flip when he sees – but no, that later, diagnostics now, see what the city can get up and running, what other secrets does she have to whisper to him, and God, we can fly.
No, no, no anger, we need anger here, not sweet, exhilarating relief at cheating death again, at getting the city back, feeling the familiar pulse of her under his fingertips as he taps into the database, and the replicators hadn’t even bothered writing their own firewalls into the city’s programming they’d been that confident they’d won – and they clearly hadn’t counted on Rodney McKay, serves them right – and God we can fly.
The thought stretches out along skeins of possibility, almost too big for him to hold, and Rodney’s imagination has always been more spacious than most, like being three again – and this, clearest memory – staring up at the night sky, Orion marching his way across it (his dad, before things went horribly wrong, had explained constellations to him), and trying to see to the end of that blackness.
He never could, though physics has worked out the rate of the universe’s expansion, knows the infinity it provides within the boundaries of curved space, the other infinities of different universes folded together. Possibility, worlds of it, and not just out there but back here in his city.
Adrenaline for a different reason now, and he can hear the Marines shifting behind him, annoyed to be stuck guarding the mad scientist, but who the hell cares? because he’s home and – he’s stuck in orbit around this – the city can fly. Figuring out how is a matter of time.
Rodney contemplates this as he stands in front of one of the terminals, watching data weave its patterns across the display.
Something to do with the control chair, he bets. He’ll need to go down there eventually – soon, sooner is better, maybe right now even, and maybe they can go flying right now because how hard could it be? He just saved the day after .2 seconds of thought and planning; making the city fly shouldn’t be too difficult. Granted, there are still logistics to figure out and the first flight won’t be anything fancy, maybe one time around the planet, and he should probably tell John, and think about the way John’s face will light up when Rodney says John, we can fly.
A small disturbance by the door, one of the Marines shuffling aside with a muttered Yes, sir, and think of the Devil, John walks in.
“Hey, Rodney.” Like every day, in tac vest and t-shirt, hands folded beatifically atop his P90. Dried sweat makes his hair stick up more than usual.
“We can fly,” Rodney says. “Three ZPMs – three! I mean...” He vents some of his excitement on the keypad, unable to keep bounds on it. The screen flickers madly with numbers. “I mean, do you realize how incredibly cool this is?”
John doesn’t say anything, but the mad grin on his face says it all, all the reaction Rodney needs, and out of all the people here – not that there are many, but pretending Atlantis is back to the way it was – John is probably the only other person besides himself capable of grasping, or attempting to grasp because such things cannot truly be grasped, the immensity of this sort of coolness.
“There’s still so much to do,” Rodney tells him, “and I’ll probably have to wait until Zelenka gets back because I don’t think even I could get everything up and running by myself, but once I figure out the mechanisms – which won’t take too long – I can run some simulations, and man, if you’d told me today I’d be back in Atlantis and that we could fly I’d have told you there weren’t words enough to express the breadth and depth of your stupidity, but I am and we can and – ”
“And we should probably get some sleep,” John breaks in, voice dipping in smoothly alongside Rodney’s, slow where Rodney's is swift.
Rodney starts to retract what he’d thought about John’s sense of coolness, but he catches sight of what’s lies beneath John’s eyes, under the smooth and the slow.
He says something unimportant and agreeable, yes, good, sleep is good you’re right, let me finish this really quickly, not quickly enough, though, for what he sees just there beneath John’s surface calm and laid-backness, what the Marines can’t see as he shuts off the console and he and John troop out of the room.
The Marines move to heel the both of them, but John is explaining that he’s got it under control, he and Dr. McKay are good, really, thanks guys, and you should report to... to whoever’s in charge of you back on the Daedalus, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Rodney doesn’t pay much attention to the round of yes, sir’s and last-second But Colonel Caldwell says, too busy looking up and down the corridors, suddenly and infinitely delighted by the soft lighting, the subterranean hum of the city.
“Lots of stuff to do tomorrow,” John says, and with a start Rodney realizes that John’s talking to him.
“It is tomorrow,” Rodney points out, because it is, 0142 Atlantis time, so easy to slip back into a rhythm he never really left. The city feels different at night, though he doesn’t know how that can be so.
“Okay, lots of stuff to do later today,” John amends. He tilts his head in the general direction of their quarters. “You coming?”
“Yeah, yeah. Coming.” Rodney falls into step next to John, trying not to walk too close, and it occurs to him that he has both John and his city back. He circles around this thought for a bit, and it’s as amazing as flight.
Beautiful, fresh and new, her lines banishing the memory of his lab back on Earth with its rust and steel and grinding turbines. He realizes he’s grinning maybe a bit too madly, running his fingertips along the walls, and he’d feel stupid if this weren’t John next to him, John who’s woven into Rodney’s secret images of Atlantis, inextricably a part of them.
“You okay?”
“What? Why?”
“Just checkin’.”
“Since you asked...” Rodney pauses. “Yeah, I’m doing okay.”
“Good.” John gives him that quick, half-smile of his, the one that Rodney only now realizes he’s missed – the one without mockery or irony, the one that actually reaches John’s eyes and makes them shine.
“Caldwell sent some stuff down – power bars, sleeping bags, MREs – meatloaf MREs...” John trails off significantly. “We should grab some food and hit the hay. Big day tomorrow.”
“Today,” Rodney corrects.
“Yup.”
They turn into John’s quarters, which are closest, and Rodney almost doesn’t recognize the place without its Johnny Cash poster, the surfboard and golf clubs, the myriad little things that mark this as John’s place. Yet it somehow is John’s place, despite their absence, and John belongs here – or the room belongs around John, his space – in the multicolored, patterned pool of light from the windows, half-open now to catch the breeze and the reflection of the moon and stars off the water.
The bed is gone, removed by the Ancients or the replicators Rodney doesn’t know. A pair of sleeping bags sit next to the empty frame, silently promising a night of hell for Rodney’s back.
He informs John of this.
John grins and shakes his head, unclips his P90 and sets it against the bedside table.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have sex then, with your bad back and all,” John says, dripping concern. Rodney’s body jolts a bit at sex, and John grins as he sees it. Rodney scowls. John just laughs and begins to strip off his field gear.
Rodney watches him, the compact, economical movements, the effortlessness that makes John so hypnotic to watch. In his own way, Rodney appreciates harmony and that’s what John is, something like captured energy, poetry, a symmetry to him that Rodney envies and wants and needs.
And has now, when he hadn’t thought to ever have it or John again.
He swallows around that thought, his tac vest suffocating around his chest, and he tries to undo it with graceless fingers. John’s watching him in the half-light of the room – busted lights, something to fix, something for morning he decides – and something dangerously close to affection hovers there. Rodney wonders obliquely what John sees when he looks at him, knows he’ll never ask because the answer frightens him.
“You need help?” John asks, and the teasing rise of the question, how many astrophysicists does it take to undo a tac vest?, is just for show, a formality.
“Oh, please.” He holds up a hand as John advances on him. “That was sarcasm, not a request.”
“Really? Wouldn’t have thought it.” John rolls his eyes and keeps coming, moving into Rodney’s personal space with the ease of long practice. His hands come up to the clips of Rodney’s vest, his fingers pause short of undoing them.
“God, I love that field vest,” John says, dark and deep, though still overlaid with teasing, and Rodney remembers saying something very like that on a hot afternoon back in Nevada.
“I, um, like – ” Yours he wants to say, because he does, and he also really likes John’s thigh holster, which he can feel pressed against his leg as John moves closer. He can smell sweat and nylon, and John is hot under his tac vest when Rodney slips his fingers beneath it, warm shudder of muscle.
John’s mouth on his, cutting off words and thought, is warm too, missed, familiar, but the kiss shocks him like something surprising, electric the brush of wristband across his cheek as John’s fingers slide through his hair. Sweat, salt, gunmetal – those are what John smells like, after-mission smells, something in there about scent as memory triggers, and breathing him in brings back memory of all the other times they’ve done this, and simultaneously, the reality that they’re here, home, in Atlantis, and alive together.
Together, and the word touches off memories of their time apart, Landry’s threat at Midway, which Rodney had heard through the haze of distraction and urgency.
Maybe not so together, home not so permanent anymore, and maybe he’ll find anger tonight after all.
He can feel John tense against him, obviously sensing the change in mood, all that warmth pulling away.
“You cool?”
Not like John will believe him if he says yes, but Rodney nods anyway.
“Can we get back to the kissing?”
“Should take care of the sleeping bags first.” John’s leer is a bit too forced, not-so-subtle maneuvering for space as he backs up. “You haven’t freaked out yet tonight.”
“Yeah, well, excuse me for being slow.”
Rodney feels the anger coming back, making itself felt in the restless jitter of hands. He paces, the four steps across, four steps back on the diagonal between the bed and the door. John rolls his eyes as he kneels to undo the sleeping bags, spread them in a nylon rustle across the floor. Rodney stares down at his head, the sweat and half-darkness making it black, though Rodney knows it’s that near-black shade of brown, kept from it by hints of red here and there.
“It’s just, you heard Landry.” He’s talking, and exhaustion and anger and fear have pretty much demolished the brain-mouth filter (which functions questionably in the best of times). “You heard him, your career is pretty much dead, because let’s face it, he wasn’t promising that you’d be promoted to general...” step, step, step, step, turn, watch John from the corner of his eye, small corner of calm in the haze of panic, “... and oh my God, do you have any idea what SGC’s going to do to us, once they have us back on Earth?” Four more steps, turn, and John is standing now. “We’ll all be out on our collective asses, all four of us. There’s no way – ”
The filter briefly re-engages, because there’s no way he can bring himself to say the words.
There’s no way they’re going to let us stay on Atlantis.
“It’ll be fine, Rodney,” John says, sounding absolutely convinced, like he can read the future as well as he can read Rodney’s mind. Maybe he can. “O’Neill owes us – big time. Wolsey owes us – also big time. They’ll work it with the Air Force and IOA, and that’ll be their way of saying thank you.”
“Do you not remember that IOA’s idea of ‘Thank you for saving the world’ happens to be an interrogation?” They’d turned the Wraith back, practically at Earth’s doorstep, and Weir had almost been removed. Impeached, whatever it is you do to people who fall somewhere between expedition leader, mayor, and ambassador. “Not to mention the U.S. military’s decidedly idiotic...” He trails off as John stiffens, unwilling to bring up that old wound, the rescue mission in Afghanistan, John’s demotion. “They’ll send me back to Nevada, if they let me stay in the program,” he says instead, surprised at how much worse that seems than anything else he can think of, worse than Siberia, even – heat and sun and isolation.
“It’ll be fine Rodney,” John says again, and the fitful light of the room can’t hide the determination on his face. Whether it’s determination to calm Rodney down or to get them through the bureaucratic firestorm Rodney imagines is on the horizon, Rodney doesn’t know. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it, okay?”
Like they’ve gotten through everything before, but it just pisses Rodney off, that a bunch of suits could take away what they’ve won back for themselves. Rodney says this, voice small and tight with frustration.
John doesn’t even answer, because really, Rodney could go on all night and John probably knows this, and John also probably knows the best way to shut Rodney up is to distract him.
Predictable, John’s approach – moving closer, hauling Rodney into his body by his jacket collar – and John’s mouth on his both distracts and answers him, determination there like there’d been in John’s eyes, and John kisses like he does everything else: confident, playful, leading Rodney along like this is the best thing in the world, come on, isn’t it cool? It’ll be great; don’t worry.
“So interfacing the ARDs with Atlantis’ shield...” John unzips Rodney’s jacket, mouth on his neck, the words echoing across muscle and nerve, “Where’d that come from?”
“Oh, you know, it just sort of came to me.” Rodney gestures vaguely into the ether, the place where all insane plans come from.
“Cool,” John says.
And John, like his plan, an idea, a dream, just comes to him.
Fingers on Rodney’s face again, spidering across his cheekbones, behind his ears, and his own fingers thread through John’s hair, covered with ink-dark strands. John’s neck is sensitive; a stroke there, tip of index finger tracing down that long, elegant line, earns a full-body shudder, a warning that would have more force if the hands now at Rodney’s belt didn’t shake so much.
He does it again; John tugs Rodney’s shirt up and over his head with more force than necessary.
The lights flicker off, and what light remains belong to the moon and stars and sea.
“Come on,” John growls, and after pulling off his own shirt pulls Rodney close again, playfulness vanishing into something deep and hard, too much teeth in their next kiss. John unapologetically bites at Rodney’s lower lip, the pulse point at his neck, the hollow between his collar bones, mouth and body ordering Rodney back and back, down down down to the floor, and it’s easy, so easy, to go and pull John down with him.
“Better,” John says approvingly, which Rodney really could contest because he’s the one with the bad back and he’s the one on the bottom, but John sort of rocks against him, pressing into his lower body, shock of light and pleasure bouncing back and forth between Rodney’s groin and brain, and complaints vanish in that brilliance.
“Really good,” he agrees in an odd, choked sort of voice, and John hums, yeah, yeah it is, really good, too good, too good to be real except even the memory of what it’s like kissing John, having John touch him, quick hands undoing his clothes, undoing him, is nothing like this, the now into which they’ve fallen.
Weeks of stumbling and wrong turns and no direction, the only time he’d felt grounded had been on the phone with John, with only John’s voice to bring him back from being utterly lost. All that work to do, a lifetime of it, and it had paled next to a few moments, Hey, Rodney in John’s static-textured drawl and, at last, the vivid heat of a summer afternoon and Rodney lying sprawled on his couch with John’s voice cradled against his ear.
After their conversation that day – phone sex, Rodney, it was phone sex – they hadn’t had a chance to do anything else. Rodney’s plane had arrived late in Denver, enough time for John and Carson to pick him up, go to dinner, and then go off and save the world again.
Now there’s time, and though the worried voice in the back of Rodney’s head protests the truth of that, the clamor of blood and flesh and presence drowns it out – now, now, now, and the assertion of John’s body atop his realer than anything can possibly be, all that heat, familiar energy humming under his skin, fingers callused and body scarred and perfect.
Nothing to trip over this time, no reason to feel like he’s falling, like John’s caught him again.
And John has, Rodney realizes, staring up at him.
“Don’t move.” Like he can with John’s thighs bracketing him, those clever hands which have somehow gotten around his wrists, pressing them into the sleeping bag.
“Did I mention this is going to be hell for my back?” Rodney mutters.
In answer the dark, disheveled head bends low over Rodney’s torso, and silver runs lovingly along the line of John’s shoulders, down his arm, the flattened curves of his body, changes, shifts, catches the new angles of moving flesh. The patterns from the window play across his skin, tiger-striping it with shadows and light.
Different patterns mark Rodney’s body and John follows them with his mouth, fire overlaying shadows across his chest. Teeth sudden and sharp on one nipple, the bite deep and going deeper, tongue soothing, and Rodney hangs suspended somewhere between pleasure and Jeeezuschrist that hurt and warn me next time.
“Oh, my God,” is what Rodney thinks he says, or maybe it’s Oh John or any one of a thousand other things.
John laughs and says something that sounds like his name, feels like it as his lips shape Rodney into Rodney’s stomach. Finally, finally he frees Rodney’s wrists, and his hands slip down between them, knuckles teasing across ribcage, the crease of flesh at Rodney’s thighs, one bolder and more demanding that dips further down.
John’s fingers play down the length of his cock, play him, making his breath and pulse ratchet into a faster tempo, and Rodney feels himself respond the way he thinks Atlantis responds – fully, wholly, willingly, and Rodney grasps at John’s shoulder, anchoring himself, like he doesn’t need the city and her three ZPMs to fly.
John’s shoulder shifts under his hand, the joint rolling in the cup of Rodney’s palm, skin smooth-rough, like stroking velvet cross-grain, sweat just covering the roughness of a lived-in, fought-in body. Muscles tense under Rodney’s fingers, heavier now than when they’d first met, new scars that Rodney finds on John’s chest, bump where a rib hadn’t healed the way it should have.
He’s looking, he realizes, for changes. Six weeks it’s been, that’s all, but it seems longer and John had gone offworld without Rodney, Teyla, or Ronon around to make sure he didn’t kill himself.
“It wasn’t the Ori,” John says as Rodney inspects a razor-fine white line, but leans back obligingly when Rodney demands that John shut up and just let him look, for crying out loud, and the light shifts on him again, painting the left side of his face, his chest, sharp line of shadow under John’s collar bone where it can’t reach, light again spilling down ribcage and flank and thigh.
“Wasn’t worried about the Ori,” Rodney tells him, fingers wandering the topography of John’s body. John’s good at surviving the big stuff, the hell-level monsters. Rodney’s more worried about tripping and stumbling, alien equivalents of poison sumac, cuts, scrapes, angry natives. He says this, and though he can’t see clearly, he knows John’s rolling his eyes.
“Need to shut you up,” John says decisively, a heartbeat before Rodney can digress into a minor freakout on chance and the odds of John dying in some spectacularly pedestrian manner, slides swiftly down Rodney’s body – sharp drag of skin and skin and body hair that leaves Rodney wordless, except for a choked off Oh God when John pauses, grins madly up at him, and takes him in his mouth.
The sensation, beautiful heat and wetness and the pleasure burns it’s so good, has him up on his elbows, hips jacknifing uselessly against the arm pressed hard across them, and all he can think of is John’s mouth, that powerful arm keeping him still, the free hand reaching for lubricant – the snap of the top punctuates the humming quiet – and slipping down between his legs.
John’s fingers in him are deft, businesslike, almost rough like maybe his patience is going, too, and Rodney can picture the narrow line of concentration between his eyes, no talking this time though John usually talks during this part, distracting Rodney who tends, understandably, to be impatient, but this time... This time there’s silence, tight and focused, broken only by the shuff of the sleeping bag as it slides a bit, by the shift of flesh and the soft, choked sound that is the two of them breathing.
Disheveled and sweat-slicked, hazel eyes almost obsidian-dark, that kind of glassiness to them, and Rodney’s heart stutters out of its jackhammer pace, constricting painfully because God, just look at him.
“Close your eyes, Rodney,” John says hoarsely, but the roughness of his voice can’t obscure the order in it.
I don’t want to, he almost says, but even as he thinks it he feels himself nodding helplessly, his eyes closing under the weight of John’s gaze. John kisses his approval along the inside of Rodney’s thigh, fingers gentle and teasing along the back of his knee.
Sensations jump into sharp relief at that: the fingers inside Rodney pulling out with a scrape he can almost feel and hear – shiver of surprise and loss at that – the sound of John pulling his pants off, maybe less graceful than he usually is, warmth disappearing as he moves. John’s knees nudge his thighs apart, callused hands arranging him in position, warmth again as John moves low across him.
Hard, hot length pressing inside him, slow and he wants to open his eyes because he can feel everything, trapped with red and white fireworks against closed eyelids and with John everywhere, in and around and above him, inescapable, and it’s too much, way too much. Shift of John’s hips and he slides deeper, and John John John is all he can say, in this choked, desperate voice he can’t even recognize as his.
“Good, God Rodney, you have no idea,” and the words echo in John’s chest, low like they’re coming from somewhere deep inside him. He starts moving now, these long rolling thrusts that all but demand Rodney move in answer.
He has some idea, Rodney thinks distantly, caught up in the rhythm, and everything is the rhythm, is the marvelous, heavy drag of John’s body against his, breath and the tangled-up scent of the two of them, John’s hand closing around his cock, clever and knowing, John’s mouth on his and the incoherence of breath, John holding him down, guiding him, this irresistible and attractive force, and maybe there’s an equation for him, to explain how he pulls Rodney along like this, or maybe it’s like the many-body problem – no figuring it out, it just works, just is this way.
And John pulls and pulls, with mouth and hands and body and Come on Rodney whispered against Rodney’s lips, the tight, quick breaths and that wonderful body of his tensing into a final deep and shuddering thrust. John stretches taut against him, going still under Rodney’s hands in that final, blind moment when he comes. And Rodney doesn’t need open eyes to know what John looks like – he feels, remembers how John’s beautiful, stretched out over Rodney’s imperfect body, sweat glistening like rain in his hair, eyes wide and amazed with it, shuddering and vulnerable but still dangerous, God so dangerous, and yes, Rodney McKay is well and truly fucked in so, so many ways.
When Rodney opens his eyes again it’s to the shock of orgasm, light show against the darkness of the room, and for a moment in the heart of it he sees John’s rapt face watching him, all that light reflected in his eyes, pleasure and disbelief and gratitude, something deep behind the brightness that plays on the surface.
He drifts, barely aware his eyes have shut again until they flicker open and he sees that John’s still there, face unguarded for once, everything written there plain as day, and he has to reach up and touch John’s face, feel that openness for himself.
Uncomfortable pull of muscle as he stretches but John kisses away the frown of pain, smoothing it out into a minor accent, a grace note that sets off the thrum of pleasure and contentment. Dimly, he feels John shift and pull out, pull away, cool sea air over him, but then warmth again, John covering his lower body, licking away the splatters of come across Rodney’s torso.
Arousal, or the idea of it, shivers through him; John laughs against his belly, feeling what Rodney can’t keep back.
“Later,” John says quietly, crawling back up to drape himself alongside Rodney, breathing We’ve got time into a series of kisses across Rodney’s mouth and cheekbones. Rodney peers hazily at him, and John’s face serious and intent in the half-light.
And that... that should look ridiculous under the tousled hair and the post-sex looseness of John’s body, but doesn’t, instead surprises Rodney into stillness for a moment, long enough for John to arrange the two of them under an unzipped sleeping bag and lie back down, to arrange the both of them so Rodney’s head is tucked into the curve of John’s neck, resting on his shoulder.
“I was terrified it wasn’t going to work,” he confesses to John’s collarbone, tasting sweat and flesh along with the words.
“Worked like a dream,” John reminds him sleepily, fingers tracing silent reminders across Rodney’s right arm – we’re alive, we’re good, we’re good they say. His rangy self is folded neatly against Rodney, and Rodney can feel his heartbeat, easing down to something like normal.
Like John’s, he reminds his heart, his thoughts, which don’t want to calm down. Slow, slow like the city around them, like John’s heart, like his breath, which is warm and alive against Rodney’s neck.
-end-
Post-fic notes: 'Cynosure' is another name for the constellation Ursa Minor. It literally means 'dog's tail' in Greek, but because the constellation contains the Pole Star (Polaris/the North Star), 'cynosure' has also come to mean a guide or a fixed point, a point of attraction and attention (often this attraction is one of beauty or some other positive attribute; OED2). I'd actually already used 'Cynosure' as a chapter title in an LotR piece from a few years ago, but I love the word and the image, and they seem appropriate here.
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard
Rating/Warnings: NC17
Spoilers: Tag to 3.11 "Return II"
Word count: c. 5,000
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Advertisements: Sequel to Wireless.
Notes: I'm so sorry for the inordinate amount of time this took.. hope it's worth the wait. *fidgety*
CYNOSURE
They’re back, they’re home, and Rodney knows he should be happy.
Because you’re happy when you’ve stared certain death in the face and said, “No, not today, thank you,” and saved a city, your city, saved your friends from a painful introduction to oblivion.
But Rodney doesn’t want happiness, Rodney wants anger, the Rodney smash kind of anger, anger like the enzyme, that focused and intense, because happiness and contentedness haven’t solved anything in the world he knows. They don’t belong with the thrum of adrenaline in his blood, the insomnia he suspects will plague him for the next several weeks. He claws after that anger as he stalks along the corridors near the control tower, leaving his escort of Marines far behind, moving through the emptiness of his labs, angry that they aren’t filled with computers and life, the things and people he needs to function.
He needs to shout at Zelenka, the science team, Sheppard for almost getting himself killed, curse the stupid replicators for breaking something that will take him eons and an inhuman amount of ingenuity to fix. He needs to spend the next several hours venting adrenaline in simulations, the fine, obsessive detail work that can smooth out his thoughts and make them still into a tranquility of diagnostics and algorithms.
But Zelenka’s not here and neither is the science team, and he and John and the rest of them all almost died, twice, once in Rodney’s mind and once in reality.
(No way wild horses or Sheppard or replicators will ever drag out of him the fear of all those variables falling apart, with no time to second-guess them or simulate or project results, everything riding on Wolsey buying the decoy plan, the replicators buying the decoy plan and not mindfucking them all to double-check, the shield-disruptor interface actually working, Caldwell deciding not to blow up Atlantis on principle, O’Neill or no O’Neill.)
The ifs drive him crazy with wondering, because Rodney is the kind of person who has to know what happens in all possible futures – call it too much experience with alternate selves, or too much dabbling in quantum mechanics. And that’s why he needs a project, something to work on, to fix, and that’s why he’s going insane between the adrenaline and disbelief, the mad improbability of being alive.
But the replicators have left the city like new, better than new, practically with a fresh coat of paint and with three, count ‘em, three ZPMs. The city can fly, her shackles off, and God, so much to do, so much work, so little time to do all the things he wants to do.
Okay okay okay, no laptops or interfaces, but he’s good enough at reading Ancient – the technical stuff, in any case, and Elizabeth can have the poetry and the rest of it – that he can work his way through diagnostics without the help anyway, though he’ll need help eventually of course because brilliant as he is he’s just one person, and wow Radek is going to flip when he sees – but no, that later, diagnostics now, see what the city can get up and running, what other secrets does she have to whisper to him, and God, we can fly.
No, no, no anger, we need anger here, not sweet, exhilarating relief at cheating death again, at getting the city back, feeling the familiar pulse of her under his fingertips as he taps into the database, and the replicators hadn’t even bothered writing their own firewalls into the city’s programming they’d been that confident they’d won – and they clearly hadn’t counted on Rodney McKay, serves them right – and God we can fly.
The thought stretches out along skeins of possibility, almost too big for him to hold, and Rodney’s imagination has always been more spacious than most, like being three again – and this, clearest memory – staring up at the night sky, Orion marching his way across it (his dad, before things went horribly wrong, had explained constellations to him), and trying to see to the end of that blackness.
He never could, though physics has worked out the rate of the universe’s expansion, knows the infinity it provides within the boundaries of curved space, the other infinities of different universes folded together. Possibility, worlds of it, and not just out there but back here in his city.
Adrenaline for a different reason now, and he can hear the Marines shifting behind him, annoyed to be stuck guarding the mad scientist, but who the hell cares? because he’s home and – he’s stuck in orbit around this – the city can fly. Figuring out how is a matter of time.
Rodney contemplates this as he stands in front of one of the terminals, watching data weave its patterns across the display.
Something to do with the control chair, he bets. He’ll need to go down there eventually – soon, sooner is better, maybe right now even, and maybe they can go flying right now because how hard could it be? He just saved the day after .2 seconds of thought and planning; making the city fly shouldn’t be too difficult. Granted, there are still logistics to figure out and the first flight won’t be anything fancy, maybe one time around the planet, and he should probably tell John, and think about the way John’s face will light up when Rodney says John, we can fly.
A small disturbance by the door, one of the Marines shuffling aside with a muttered Yes, sir, and think of the Devil, John walks in.
“Hey, Rodney.” Like every day, in tac vest and t-shirt, hands folded beatifically atop his P90. Dried sweat makes his hair stick up more than usual.
“We can fly,” Rodney says. “Three ZPMs – three! I mean...” He vents some of his excitement on the keypad, unable to keep bounds on it. The screen flickers madly with numbers. “I mean, do you realize how incredibly cool this is?”
John doesn’t say anything, but the mad grin on his face says it all, all the reaction Rodney needs, and out of all the people here – not that there are many, but pretending Atlantis is back to the way it was – John is probably the only other person besides himself capable of grasping, or attempting to grasp because such things cannot truly be grasped, the immensity of this sort of coolness.
“There’s still so much to do,” Rodney tells him, “and I’ll probably have to wait until Zelenka gets back because I don’t think even I could get everything up and running by myself, but once I figure out the mechanisms – which won’t take too long – I can run some simulations, and man, if you’d told me today I’d be back in Atlantis and that we could fly I’d have told you there weren’t words enough to express the breadth and depth of your stupidity, but I am and we can and – ”
“And we should probably get some sleep,” John breaks in, voice dipping in smoothly alongside Rodney’s, slow where Rodney's is swift.
Rodney starts to retract what he’d thought about John’s sense of coolness, but he catches sight of what’s lies beneath John’s eyes, under the smooth and the slow.
He says something unimportant and agreeable, yes, good, sleep is good you’re right, let me finish this really quickly, not quickly enough, though, for what he sees just there beneath John’s surface calm and laid-backness, what the Marines can’t see as he shuts off the console and he and John troop out of the room.
The Marines move to heel the both of them, but John is explaining that he’s got it under control, he and Dr. McKay are good, really, thanks guys, and you should report to... to whoever’s in charge of you back on the Daedalus, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Rodney doesn’t pay much attention to the round of yes, sir’s and last-second But Colonel Caldwell says, too busy looking up and down the corridors, suddenly and infinitely delighted by the soft lighting, the subterranean hum of the city.
“Lots of stuff to do tomorrow,” John says, and with a start Rodney realizes that John’s talking to him.
“It is tomorrow,” Rodney points out, because it is, 0142 Atlantis time, so easy to slip back into a rhythm he never really left. The city feels different at night, though he doesn’t know how that can be so.
“Okay, lots of stuff to do later today,” John amends. He tilts his head in the general direction of their quarters. “You coming?”
“Yeah, yeah. Coming.” Rodney falls into step next to John, trying not to walk too close, and it occurs to him that he has both John and his city back. He circles around this thought for a bit, and it’s as amazing as flight.
Beautiful, fresh and new, her lines banishing the memory of his lab back on Earth with its rust and steel and grinding turbines. He realizes he’s grinning maybe a bit too madly, running his fingertips along the walls, and he’d feel stupid if this weren’t John next to him, John who’s woven into Rodney’s secret images of Atlantis, inextricably a part of them.
“You okay?”
“What? Why?”
“Just checkin’.”
“Since you asked...” Rodney pauses. “Yeah, I’m doing okay.”
“Good.” John gives him that quick, half-smile of his, the one that Rodney only now realizes he’s missed – the one without mockery or irony, the one that actually reaches John’s eyes and makes them shine.
“Caldwell sent some stuff down – power bars, sleeping bags, MREs – meatloaf MREs...” John trails off significantly. “We should grab some food and hit the hay. Big day tomorrow.”
“Today,” Rodney corrects.
“Yup.”
They turn into John’s quarters, which are closest, and Rodney almost doesn’t recognize the place without its Johnny Cash poster, the surfboard and golf clubs, the myriad little things that mark this as John’s place. Yet it somehow is John’s place, despite their absence, and John belongs here – or the room belongs around John, his space – in the multicolored, patterned pool of light from the windows, half-open now to catch the breeze and the reflection of the moon and stars off the water.
The bed is gone, removed by the Ancients or the replicators Rodney doesn’t know. A pair of sleeping bags sit next to the empty frame, silently promising a night of hell for Rodney’s back.
He informs John of this.
John grins and shakes his head, unclips his P90 and sets it against the bedside table.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have sex then, with your bad back and all,” John says, dripping concern. Rodney’s body jolts a bit at sex, and John grins as he sees it. Rodney scowls. John just laughs and begins to strip off his field gear.
Rodney watches him, the compact, economical movements, the effortlessness that makes John so hypnotic to watch. In his own way, Rodney appreciates harmony and that’s what John is, something like captured energy, poetry, a symmetry to him that Rodney envies and wants and needs.
And has now, when he hadn’t thought to ever have it or John again.
He swallows around that thought, his tac vest suffocating around his chest, and he tries to undo it with graceless fingers. John’s watching him in the half-light of the room – busted lights, something to fix, something for morning he decides – and something dangerously close to affection hovers there. Rodney wonders obliquely what John sees when he looks at him, knows he’ll never ask because the answer frightens him.
“You need help?” John asks, and the teasing rise of the question, how many astrophysicists does it take to undo a tac vest?, is just for show, a formality.
“Oh, please.” He holds up a hand as John advances on him. “That was sarcasm, not a request.”
“Really? Wouldn’t have thought it.” John rolls his eyes and keeps coming, moving into Rodney’s personal space with the ease of long practice. His hands come up to the clips of Rodney’s vest, his fingers pause short of undoing them.
“God, I love that field vest,” John says, dark and deep, though still overlaid with teasing, and Rodney remembers saying something very like that on a hot afternoon back in Nevada.
“I, um, like – ” Yours he wants to say, because he does, and he also really likes John’s thigh holster, which he can feel pressed against his leg as John moves closer. He can smell sweat and nylon, and John is hot under his tac vest when Rodney slips his fingers beneath it, warm shudder of muscle.
John’s mouth on his, cutting off words and thought, is warm too, missed, familiar, but the kiss shocks him like something surprising, electric the brush of wristband across his cheek as John’s fingers slide through his hair. Sweat, salt, gunmetal – those are what John smells like, after-mission smells, something in there about scent as memory triggers, and breathing him in brings back memory of all the other times they’ve done this, and simultaneously, the reality that they’re here, home, in Atlantis, and alive together.
Together, and the word touches off memories of their time apart, Landry’s threat at Midway, which Rodney had heard through the haze of distraction and urgency.
Maybe not so together, home not so permanent anymore, and maybe he’ll find anger tonight after all.
He can feel John tense against him, obviously sensing the change in mood, all that warmth pulling away.
“You cool?”
Not like John will believe him if he says yes, but Rodney nods anyway.
“Can we get back to the kissing?”
“Should take care of the sleeping bags first.” John’s leer is a bit too forced, not-so-subtle maneuvering for space as he backs up. “You haven’t freaked out yet tonight.”
“Yeah, well, excuse me for being slow.”
Rodney feels the anger coming back, making itself felt in the restless jitter of hands. He paces, the four steps across, four steps back on the diagonal between the bed and the door. John rolls his eyes as he kneels to undo the sleeping bags, spread them in a nylon rustle across the floor. Rodney stares down at his head, the sweat and half-darkness making it black, though Rodney knows it’s that near-black shade of brown, kept from it by hints of red here and there.
“It’s just, you heard Landry.” He’s talking, and exhaustion and anger and fear have pretty much demolished the brain-mouth filter (which functions questionably in the best of times). “You heard him, your career is pretty much dead, because let’s face it, he wasn’t promising that you’d be promoted to general...” step, step, step, step, turn, watch John from the corner of his eye, small corner of calm in the haze of panic, “... and oh my God, do you have any idea what SGC’s going to do to us, once they have us back on Earth?” Four more steps, turn, and John is standing now. “We’ll all be out on our collective asses, all four of us. There’s no way – ”
The filter briefly re-engages, because there’s no way he can bring himself to say the words.
There’s no way they’re going to let us stay on Atlantis.
“It’ll be fine, Rodney,” John says, sounding absolutely convinced, like he can read the future as well as he can read Rodney’s mind. Maybe he can. “O’Neill owes us – big time. Wolsey owes us – also big time. They’ll work it with the Air Force and IOA, and that’ll be their way of saying thank you.”
“Do you not remember that IOA’s idea of ‘Thank you for saving the world’ happens to be an interrogation?” They’d turned the Wraith back, practically at Earth’s doorstep, and Weir had almost been removed. Impeached, whatever it is you do to people who fall somewhere between expedition leader, mayor, and ambassador. “Not to mention the U.S. military’s decidedly idiotic...” He trails off as John stiffens, unwilling to bring up that old wound, the rescue mission in Afghanistan, John’s demotion. “They’ll send me back to Nevada, if they let me stay in the program,” he says instead, surprised at how much worse that seems than anything else he can think of, worse than Siberia, even – heat and sun and isolation.
“It’ll be fine Rodney,” John says again, and the fitful light of the room can’t hide the determination on his face. Whether it’s determination to calm Rodney down or to get them through the bureaucratic firestorm Rodney imagines is on the horizon, Rodney doesn’t know. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it, okay?”
Like they’ve gotten through everything before, but it just pisses Rodney off, that a bunch of suits could take away what they’ve won back for themselves. Rodney says this, voice small and tight with frustration.
John doesn’t even answer, because really, Rodney could go on all night and John probably knows this, and John also probably knows the best way to shut Rodney up is to distract him.
Predictable, John’s approach – moving closer, hauling Rodney into his body by his jacket collar – and John’s mouth on his both distracts and answers him, determination there like there’d been in John’s eyes, and John kisses like he does everything else: confident, playful, leading Rodney along like this is the best thing in the world, come on, isn’t it cool? It’ll be great; don’t worry.
“So interfacing the ARDs with Atlantis’ shield...” John unzips Rodney’s jacket, mouth on his neck, the words echoing across muscle and nerve, “Where’d that come from?”
“Oh, you know, it just sort of came to me.” Rodney gestures vaguely into the ether, the place where all insane plans come from.
“Cool,” John says.
And John, like his plan, an idea, a dream, just comes to him.
Fingers on Rodney’s face again, spidering across his cheekbones, behind his ears, and his own fingers thread through John’s hair, covered with ink-dark strands. John’s neck is sensitive; a stroke there, tip of index finger tracing down that long, elegant line, earns a full-body shudder, a warning that would have more force if the hands now at Rodney’s belt didn’t shake so much.
He does it again; John tugs Rodney’s shirt up and over his head with more force than necessary.
The lights flicker off, and what light remains belong to the moon and stars and sea.
“Come on,” John growls, and after pulling off his own shirt pulls Rodney close again, playfulness vanishing into something deep and hard, too much teeth in their next kiss. John unapologetically bites at Rodney’s lower lip, the pulse point at his neck, the hollow between his collar bones, mouth and body ordering Rodney back and back, down down down to the floor, and it’s easy, so easy, to go and pull John down with him.
“Better,” John says approvingly, which Rodney really could contest because he’s the one with the bad back and he’s the one on the bottom, but John sort of rocks against him, pressing into his lower body, shock of light and pleasure bouncing back and forth between Rodney’s groin and brain, and complaints vanish in that brilliance.
“Really good,” he agrees in an odd, choked sort of voice, and John hums, yeah, yeah it is, really good, too good, too good to be real except even the memory of what it’s like kissing John, having John touch him, quick hands undoing his clothes, undoing him, is nothing like this, the now into which they’ve fallen.
Weeks of stumbling and wrong turns and no direction, the only time he’d felt grounded had been on the phone with John, with only John’s voice to bring him back from being utterly lost. All that work to do, a lifetime of it, and it had paled next to a few moments, Hey, Rodney in John’s static-textured drawl and, at last, the vivid heat of a summer afternoon and Rodney lying sprawled on his couch with John’s voice cradled against his ear.
After their conversation that day – phone sex, Rodney, it was phone sex – they hadn’t had a chance to do anything else. Rodney’s plane had arrived late in Denver, enough time for John and Carson to pick him up, go to dinner, and then go off and save the world again.
Now there’s time, and though the worried voice in the back of Rodney’s head protests the truth of that, the clamor of blood and flesh and presence drowns it out – now, now, now, and the assertion of John’s body atop his realer than anything can possibly be, all that heat, familiar energy humming under his skin, fingers callused and body scarred and perfect.
Nothing to trip over this time, no reason to feel like he’s falling, like John’s caught him again.
And John has, Rodney realizes, staring up at him.
“Don’t move.” Like he can with John’s thighs bracketing him, those clever hands which have somehow gotten around his wrists, pressing them into the sleeping bag.
“Did I mention this is going to be hell for my back?” Rodney mutters.
In answer the dark, disheveled head bends low over Rodney’s torso, and silver runs lovingly along the line of John’s shoulders, down his arm, the flattened curves of his body, changes, shifts, catches the new angles of moving flesh. The patterns from the window play across his skin, tiger-striping it with shadows and light.
Different patterns mark Rodney’s body and John follows them with his mouth, fire overlaying shadows across his chest. Teeth sudden and sharp on one nipple, the bite deep and going deeper, tongue soothing, and Rodney hangs suspended somewhere between pleasure and Jeeezuschrist that hurt and warn me next time.
“Oh, my God,” is what Rodney thinks he says, or maybe it’s Oh John or any one of a thousand other things.
John laughs and says something that sounds like his name, feels like it as his lips shape Rodney into Rodney’s stomach. Finally, finally he frees Rodney’s wrists, and his hands slip down between them, knuckles teasing across ribcage, the crease of flesh at Rodney’s thighs, one bolder and more demanding that dips further down.
John’s fingers play down the length of his cock, play him, making his breath and pulse ratchet into a faster tempo, and Rodney feels himself respond the way he thinks Atlantis responds – fully, wholly, willingly, and Rodney grasps at John’s shoulder, anchoring himself, like he doesn’t need the city and her three ZPMs to fly.
John’s shoulder shifts under his hand, the joint rolling in the cup of Rodney’s palm, skin smooth-rough, like stroking velvet cross-grain, sweat just covering the roughness of a lived-in, fought-in body. Muscles tense under Rodney’s fingers, heavier now than when they’d first met, new scars that Rodney finds on John’s chest, bump where a rib hadn’t healed the way it should have.
He’s looking, he realizes, for changes. Six weeks it’s been, that’s all, but it seems longer and John had gone offworld without Rodney, Teyla, or Ronon around to make sure he didn’t kill himself.
“It wasn’t the Ori,” John says as Rodney inspects a razor-fine white line, but leans back obligingly when Rodney demands that John shut up and just let him look, for crying out loud, and the light shifts on him again, painting the left side of his face, his chest, sharp line of shadow under John’s collar bone where it can’t reach, light again spilling down ribcage and flank and thigh.
“Wasn’t worried about the Ori,” Rodney tells him, fingers wandering the topography of John’s body. John’s good at surviving the big stuff, the hell-level monsters. Rodney’s more worried about tripping and stumbling, alien equivalents of poison sumac, cuts, scrapes, angry natives. He says this, and though he can’t see clearly, he knows John’s rolling his eyes.
“Need to shut you up,” John says decisively, a heartbeat before Rodney can digress into a minor freakout on chance and the odds of John dying in some spectacularly pedestrian manner, slides swiftly down Rodney’s body – sharp drag of skin and skin and body hair that leaves Rodney wordless, except for a choked off Oh God when John pauses, grins madly up at him, and takes him in his mouth.
The sensation, beautiful heat and wetness and the pleasure burns it’s so good, has him up on his elbows, hips jacknifing uselessly against the arm pressed hard across them, and all he can think of is John’s mouth, that powerful arm keeping him still, the free hand reaching for lubricant – the snap of the top punctuates the humming quiet – and slipping down between his legs.
John’s fingers in him are deft, businesslike, almost rough like maybe his patience is going, too, and Rodney can picture the narrow line of concentration between his eyes, no talking this time though John usually talks during this part, distracting Rodney who tends, understandably, to be impatient, but this time... This time there’s silence, tight and focused, broken only by the shuff of the sleeping bag as it slides a bit, by the shift of flesh and the soft, choked sound that is the two of them breathing.
Disheveled and sweat-slicked, hazel eyes almost obsidian-dark, that kind of glassiness to them, and Rodney’s heart stutters out of its jackhammer pace, constricting painfully because God, just look at him.
“Close your eyes, Rodney,” John says hoarsely, but the roughness of his voice can’t obscure the order in it.
I don’t want to, he almost says, but even as he thinks it he feels himself nodding helplessly, his eyes closing under the weight of John’s gaze. John kisses his approval along the inside of Rodney’s thigh, fingers gentle and teasing along the back of his knee.
Sensations jump into sharp relief at that: the fingers inside Rodney pulling out with a scrape he can almost feel and hear – shiver of surprise and loss at that – the sound of John pulling his pants off, maybe less graceful than he usually is, warmth disappearing as he moves. John’s knees nudge his thighs apart, callused hands arranging him in position, warmth again as John moves low across him.
Hard, hot length pressing inside him, slow and he wants to open his eyes because he can feel everything, trapped with red and white fireworks against closed eyelids and with John everywhere, in and around and above him, inescapable, and it’s too much, way too much. Shift of John’s hips and he slides deeper, and John John John is all he can say, in this choked, desperate voice he can’t even recognize as his.
“Good, God Rodney, you have no idea,” and the words echo in John’s chest, low like they’re coming from somewhere deep inside him. He starts moving now, these long rolling thrusts that all but demand Rodney move in answer.
He has some idea, Rodney thinks distantly, caught up in the rhythm, and everything is the rhythm, is the marvelous, heavy drag of John’s body against his, breath and the tangled-up scent of the two of them, John’s hand closing around his cock, clever and knowing, John’s mouth on his and the incoherence of breath, John holding him down, guiding him, this irresistible and attractive force, and maybe there’s an equation for him, to explain how he pulls Rodney along like this, or maybe it’s like the many-body problem – no figuring it out, it just works, just is this way.
And John pulls and pulls, with mouth and hands and body and Come on Rodney whispered against Rodney’s lips, the tight, quick breaths and that wonderful body of his tensing into a final deep and shuddering thrust. John stretches taut against him, going still under Rodney’s hands in that final, blind moment when he comes. And Rodney doesn’t need open eyes to know what John looks like – he feels, remembers how John’s beautiful, stretched out over Rodney’s imperfect body, sweat glistening like rain in his hair, eyes wide and amazed with it, shuddering and vulnerable but still dangerous, God so dangerous, and yes, Rodney McKay is well and truly fucked in so, so many ways.
When Rodney opens his eyes again it’s to the shock of orgasm, light show against the darkness of the room, and for a moment in the heart of it he sees John’s rapt face watching him, all that light reflected in his eyes, pleasure and disbelief and gratitude, something deep behind the brightness that plays on the surface.
He drifts, barely aware his eyes have shut again until they flicker open and he sees that John’s still there, face unguarded for once, everything written there plain as day, and he has to reach up and touch John’s face, feel that openness for himself.
Uncomfortable pull of muscle as he stretches but John kisses away the frown of pain, smoothing it out into a minor accent, a grace note that sets off the thrum of pleasure and contentment. Dimly, he feels John shift and pull out, pull away, cool sea air over him, but then warmth again, John covering his lower body, licking away the splatters of come across Rodney’s torso.
Arousal, or the idea of it, shivers through him; John laughs against his belly, feeling what Rodney can’t keep back.
“Later,” John says quietly, crawling back up to drape himself alongside Rodney, breathing We’ve got time into a series of kisses across Rodney’s mouth and cheekbones. Rodney peers hazily at him, and John’s face serious and intent in the half-light.
And that... that should look ridiculous under the tousled hair and the post-sex looseness of John’s body, but doesn’t, instead surprises Rodney into stillness for a moment, long enough for John to arrange the two of them under an unzipped sleeping bag and lie back down, to arrange the both of them so Rodney’s head is tucked into the curve of John’s neck, resting on his shoulder.
“I was terrified it wasn’t going to work,” he confesses to John’s collarbone, tasting sweat and flesh along with the words.
“Worked like a dream,” John reminds him sleepily, fingers tracing silent reminders across Rodney’s right arm – we’re alive, we’re good, we’re good they say. His rangy self is folded neatly against Rodney, and Rodney can feel his heartbeat, easing down to something like normal.
Like John’s, he reminds his heart, his thoughts, which don’t want to calm down. Slow, slow like the city around them, like John’s heart, like his breath, which is warm and alive against Rodney’s neck.
-end-
Post-fic notes: 'Cynosure' is another name for the constellation Ursa Minor. It literally means 'dog's tail' in Greek, but because the constellation contains the Pole Star (Polaris/the North Star), 'cynosure' has also come to mean a guide or a fixed point, a point of attraction and attention (often this attraction is one of beauty or some other positive attribute; OED2). I'd actually already used 'Cynosure' as a chapter title in an LotR piece from a few years ago, but I love the word and the image, and they seem appropriate here.
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Thank you so much! So happy you liked it :) *Asfdsfl;kjs back at you*