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Entry tags:
.fic: I'm a Stranger Here Myself - McKay/Sheppard (PG13) 1.3
Title: I'm a Stranger Here Myself
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, preslashish
Rating/Warning: PG13 for bad words, angst
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Advertisements: Follow-up to Late Feet, from John's POV. Spoilers for "Tao of Rodney."
Word Count: 15,437
Notes: This is a quiet story.
I’M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF
It isn’t supposed to end like this, in anger so thick and hot it clogs his throat, and in between denial all he’s been able to think for the past two days is don’t let them see don’t let them don’t let them even though he’s pretty sure they know, because they have to know what they’re doing to him.
He’s relieved Rodney, Elizabeth, and the others aren’t here for this, that it’s only him and O’Neill, whose face is stripped of sarcasm and who’s watching him quietly.
“Four years on Atlantis... That’s a good tour,” O’Neill says, though four years can’t even hope to encapsulate everything that’s happened – Wraith and death and loss and finding. Home, something military kids never know. O’Neill watches him attentively, not obviously sympathetic, but kind in his own, rough way.
That only makes John angrier. His uniform clings to him like dead skin, and he barely has enough control to keep from tugging at his collar and cuffs.
“We can transfer you to another assignment – not with the SGC, of course, but another base. Stateside.” Nothing dangerous, he means, not with any of the active units still fighting out in the Middle East, nowhere he can go to kill himself. “Or, if you want, you’re eligible for retirement.” O’Neill’s thin lips turn up in a quick grin. “You’ve done your country proud. Maybe even your planet.”
There’s enough anger in him to accept retirement – no, not accept it, to choose it because he sure as hell isn’t accepting any of this – to say I’ll take that sir, thank you, choosing between the Wraith and the hard place.
When he gets back to his quarters, he doesn’t tear things apart, though he really wants to. Anonymous, all of it, his bed neatly made, foot locker organized, the few things he’d been allowed to bring with him (and the few things he’d smuggled in) stowed away, nothing to say what he’s been through and what’s been taken away. Ten deep breaths stand between him and breaking everything he can get his hands on, ten breaths and the silence between them, to sink into quiet and reason and feel his blood run calm again.
Adrenaline quivers at the edge of his awareness, blurring everything, but he can focus a bit, lucid enough to realize he’s a civilian for the first time in his life, to realize everything that comes with that – not freedom, service to his country done, but no nothing, no direction.
He could go back, he knows, tell O’Neill he’s reconsidered. It’s the logical thing to do, Rodney would say, you’re human and therefore presumably reasonable, I think, so go and ask for a transfer, and stay in the air.
Anger’s no longer in the picture, but pride is. A lot of pride, but then John Sheppard’s always had too much for his own good, and he doesn’t go looking for O’Neill again.
* * *
He wakes to piercing, painful brightness, and a face looming close over his, light behind it making a nimbus and obscuring sight, like staring straight into an eclipse.
“That Lucky Old Sun” rolls around in his head for a moment along with all the other loose thoughts, like where the hell he is and what happened.
The smell of old blood and antiseptics hits a moment later.
Infirmary? But Atlantis has better ventilation, though you can’t ever escape the scent of ocean and ozone.
Hospital. Earth. He’s an expert at ignoring disappointment. The only question now is what happened.
The doctor tells him, of course: fell off a step ladder, you lost consciousness and your friend called 911, good for him, and now we shall take you to radiology to make sure bits of skull haven’t lodged in your brain.
Rodney, John thinks, still hung up on your friend called 911. Rodney had done that.
A moment later: step ladder. He can’t recall what happened, but he remembers standing at the top of the ladder, peering into the bowels of the light fixture, realizing he’d need another screw… And that was it.
Step ladder. He winces and the doctor asks him if he’s okay. John doesn’t even try to nod, because that will cause his head to fall off his shoulders. He grunts instead.
Rodney will never, ever, in a million billion years, let him hear the end of this.
Ever.
* * *
They don’t get a ride back from the hospital in the ambulance, which disappoints John immensely. The taxi driver who takes them back to Rodney’s place is probably disappointed, too; he speeds off the second Rodney’s feet hit the curb, almost before Rodney can slam the door shut, and Rodney’s two-dollar tip flutters abandoned to the concrete.
“You know, you leave Earth for four years and they replace the human population with subliterate assholes,” Rodney grumbles as he grabs the money and stuffs it in a pocket. “Let’s go.”
John can feel Rodney’s presence at his back and knows that Rodney really wants to walk faster, because Rodney has this thing against going slowly when there’s so much to be done, but really, John’s head still hurts and his shoulders feel like Teyla and Ronon have been beating on him with, oh, titanium versions of their sticks. The back of his head feels like a replicator brainfuck orgy.
“Are you okay?” Rodney demands, inches away from his ear. He prods John out of the way to unlock the front door and push it open. Planck the cat rushes to greet them, yowling furiously, and Rodney takes a moment to soothe him – yes, this idiot fell off a ladder, I’m sorry he’s a moron, I’ll feed you, poor boy – before turning back to John and eyeing him narrowly. “You don’t look okay. You look green. Shit green.”
“Fine,” John mumbles, trying very hard not to think about shit green. The rush of cold air from inside nearly makes him ill. “Just peachy.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Sheppard, sit down before you fall down.” Coming from Rodney, this is an expression of deepest concern.
Rodney propels John through the front door and in the direction of the couch with a hand that’s warm and firm on John’s back.
John trails over, wondering if this was how Rodney’s minions felt, glad that the living room is right off the foyer and the couch within easy stumbling distance. There’s no escape from Rodney, John’s noisy, opinionated shadow, issuing half-coherent editorials on American health care and Denver traffic, and setting the prescription bottle and mostly-gone chocolate shake on the coffee table.
John collapses into the couch, likes how the old leather gives under his weight. It’s a great couch, kind of like Rodney: padded, sturdy, lived-in. Comforting, and that’s a strange thought to think about Rodney McKay.
Then again, John’s comparing a couch to him, so he’s not winning any points for mental clarity.
Planck leaps up on the back of the couch and curls up, eyeing John the entire time. At least he’s not trying to nest on John’s head, which is annoying and painful (Planck has all his claws) and which Rodney finds hilarious.
A series of random thumps and rustles comes from the hall closet, then the clatter of keys landing on a table, Rodney stomping upstairs to get something. The house is old, creaky, and Rodney’s feet sound like a herd of elephants, bang crash bang, making the base of John’s skull throb in counterpoint. He winces and shuts his eyes against the sound and the light in the living room, which has abruptly become solar-flare bright.
Bang crash bang down the stairs, footsteps, and then something fluffy and warm lands on top of him. Curious enough to risk the pain, John cracks one eye open.
Synthetic fleece blanket. Blankets, John corrects. Dark blue and green – field issue? They look like it – and smelling like detergent.
“Do you think you can manage to sleep without falling off the couch?” Rodney asks, staring narrowly at him. “I have to work down here, and I don’t want to worry about you strangling yourself in the sheets or something similarly idiotic.”
“I think I can manage not to kill myself,” John says faintly, overcome by Rodney’s take-no-prisoners brand of concern.
“Okay.” Rodney doesn’t sound terribly convinced, and he hovers a moment, something indecisive there in his eyes that John can’t quite interpret.
And that’s crazy because John’s got the Rodney McKay Decoder Ring. But all he’s getting now is indecision and faint confusion, which is weird when not accompanied by indignation, because Rodney seems to take confusion as a personal insult.
“Okay,” Rodney says again and stalks off. “Finish your fake milkshake thing.”
They’d stopped at a fast-food place under the guise of John needing something in his stomach but being too weak and infirm to handle solid food. Mostly though it had been for Rodney, who’d downed half of it in two gulps before complaining not-quite-subvocally about brain freeze the rest of the way home.
John ignores the milkshake commandment, because his stomach is still deeply unhappy about the taxi ride and part of him is still on Atlantis time, and insisting that it’s somewhere around 2000 hours and it’s movie night, so all it wants is popcorn. He tries to ignore that thought and shifts around to a more comfortable position, one that doesn’t aggravate the scorpion coiled at the bottom of his skull.
(Seriously, that’s what it feels like, a goddamned scorpion.)
The couch smells like old leather and something else, warm and familiar. Planck purrs rustily, like he isn’t used to it, and kneads the leather with soft snaps of his claws.
John drifts for a bit listening to the thumps and rustlings coming from Rodney’s office, the occasional soft cry of delight or irritation. Sometimes he senses Rodney passing by, like a storm in the distance – crackle of far-off energy – and from time to time there’s a pause, and John can tell Rodney’s watching him.
It should make him feel weird but it doesn’t, and weirdly enough, that’s what weirds him out.
But then Rodney goes back to work, shuffles and murmurs, his presence uncharacteristically soft.
No computers in the office yet. No computers in Rodney’s bedroom either, and John would have thought the first thing Rodney would have set up would be the wireless LAN and a fiendishly complicated network so he could get back to research after six months of SGC debriefing and discharge. But Rodney’s laptops are still in their cases, and there’s a brand-new computer still in its box out in the hall, and John knows it hasn’t been opened.
Two weeks Rodney’s been here, according to the latest, reluctantly-given information from Sam Carter – which goes to show you that while you can leave the SGC it never leaves you – and Rodney doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in picking up where he left off.
But left off is Atlantis, locked away from them forever.
That thought hurts more than the concussion or the dull ache in his shoulders.
He curls around the pain, not sure if he’s defending himself or trying to lock it away, deep, way down deep where it can’t hurt anymore.
Think about something else, anything, about the private embarrassment of looking up directions to Rodney’s place and then getting spectacularly lost, getting back on the interstate and going east instead of west and not realizing it until driving back through Denver (which he’d thought he’d left twenty minutes ago), and then turning the wrong way onto Rodney’s street. He tries to picture the expression on Rodney’s face if he ever found out – and John will never confess to this in a million, billion years – and Rodney’s face would be a mixture of condescension, humor, and a complete lack of surprise.
(Well, there would be surprise, but it would mostly be surprise at the thought that John has managed to stay alive this long despite his crippling lack of intelligence.)
Anyway, he’d finally made it, and pulled up in Rodney’s driveway, staring up at the neat white two-story with its black trim, old-fashioned and sort of… graceful, in a practical way Rodney probably appreciates. He’d walked to the door and rung the bell and waited, unable to keep back a grin just thinking about Rodney’s face.
Sheppard? Priceless and still completely expected: Rodney’s eyes wide and amazed and blue, as though witnessing a spatial anomaly materializing on his doorstep.
Hey, McKay.
John goes with these thoughts for a while, memories merging into half-wakefulness and dozing, where he can hear Rodney in the here and now talking to himself and hear Rodney talking to him over last night’s dinner, explaining how John is completely doing something the wrong way and it needs to be like this, Sheppard, honestly were you raised by the Lost Tribe of People without Opposable Thumbs?, explaining to him all the reasons why he isn’t allowed to die, ever.
Here and now-Rodney walks swiftly by, at least trying to be quiet this time, muttered and incomprehensible comments trailing behind him. If he ignores the couch and the blankets and the being horizontal, John can pretend he’s in the lab, watching as Rodney zings and darts about like a demented Canadian hummingbird, pausing for heartbeats to stare at hieroglyphics, deliver a tirade or sigh happily, and then go kazooming off again. He can pretend he smells the air, tickle of ozone and ocean and salt that the filtration systems never quite scrub out, and ignoring the darkness he can see Rodney turning toward him with a triumphant grin as he prepares to explain how he, Rodney McKay, is the world’s greatest genius.
Hey, Sheppard, Rodney would say, check this out. And he’d point to something John might not understand, but even if he did, John would say, Uh, what am I looking at, McKay? just to watch Rodney draw himself up in annoyance and superiority, and start to lecture.
A louder-than-normal curse jolts him out of not-Atlantis, and John’s back on the couch again, with a headache and upset stomach, and Rodney’s back in his office, slamming a file drawer shut.
When he finds sleep again, he doesn’t dream of Atlantis or anything else, just a half-awareness of worn leather under one cheek and blankets that smell like astrophysicist and regular Tide.
He wakes up to more Rodney bellowing.
“Are you planning to take root out there or something?” Rodney shouts from the kitchen. John winces; Rodney’s voice really carries, grates against the ache low in his skull. “Come on and help me with dinner.”
“What happened to the weak and infirm?” John makes his eyes focus on his watch. It’s somewhere around six, but the digital numbers don’t want to unfuzz for him and remain stubbornly blurry.
“Shut up and get in here.”
John’s vision swims briefly as he stands – okay, maybe not so okay after all – and he needs a moment to catch both breath and balance. The silence from the kitchen becomes expectant, as though Rodney’s been waiting twenty minutes now and is wondering where John’s gotten to, if he has, in fact, managed to get lost in the space between kitchen and living room. Any day now, Colonel telegraphs itself clearly across the ten feet or so between John and the doorway, like Rodney’s thoughts are loud enough to be spoken words.
He’s missed that, John thinks absently. In a weird, masochistic way, he’s missed Rodney’s louder-than-shouting silences.
Rodney’s standing at his kitchen counter, a collection of take-out and delivery menus of all nationalities and ethnicities spread out in front of him. John knows there’s a decided preference for Italian, and Rodney distrusts Chinese on principle, because of Mandarin oranges.
There’s also a distinct lack of cutlery, cooking devices, and unprepared food.
“Um, where’s the dinner…” John indicates the counter. “Stuff.”
Rodney stares at him blankly and gestures to the menus. “This is dinner. Or will be, as soon as you tell me what you want so I can order.”
“Okay then.”
Pause, rewind.
“Wait a minute… You’re letting me pick dinner?”
“Well, yeah.” The blank look is still there, but rapidly shifts to defensiveness. “What about it?”
“I’ve been here a week, and this is the first time you’ve let me pick dinner.”
“So?” Rodney bristles, his mouth lengthening in annoyance. “Maybe I’m feeling charitable.”
John thinks about teasing Rodney over this, but really, Rodney’s letting him pick dinner, which means John can pick a place that serves limes marinaded in orange juice and served with a side of lemons and Rodney, though he would bitch about it, loudly and at great length, wouldn’t renege.
“Pizza,” John says, and points to the Quattro Canti menu. Expensive but good, not a hint of citrus or anything Rodney considers a mortal insult to pizza (especially pineapple), and Rodney’s face lights up, and John has to grin, seeing that.
John dozes and Rodney works until the pizza comes, and then they sit together on Rodney’s couch and eat, because pizza should be eaten on the couch and Rodney’s kitchen table is covered with papers and files. The sign of a proper academic, Rodney had explained just after threatening to cut John’s hands off if he touched a single thing.
Other nights, they’d be fighting over what to watch on TV, but John’s eyes can’t take much more than the faint light from the lamp on the end table, and Rodney for once seems to tolerate the quiet, not trying to fill it with disquisitions on Denver traffic, the overwhelming idiocy of the astrophysics community, his research – because, John’s starting to suspect, he isn’t doing any – and anything else Rodney’s brain vomits up from the depths.
Instead they just sit there while John picks his way through two slices of pizza and Rodney inhales five, and then they sit there some more.
At last, Rodney breaks.
“Just to reiterate from earlier, you’re not allowed to do that again,” he says in an odd, tight little voice. “House rules.”
“I won’t,” John promises, pretty sure he’s promising not to fall off another step ladder or any other seemingly innocuous household device.
“You’re out on your ass if you do.”
“Got it.”
Rodney heaves himself to his feet and wanders off to the kitchen, much in the way of Rodney whenever he’d made his point and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
John listens to familiar Rodney-noises coming from the kitchen, an incoherent monologue that doesn’t require John’s participation, and wonders if it’s a sign of dependency (or whatever Heightmeyer would call it) that he can’t imagine being anywhere else but Rodney’s old leather couch right now.
He can imagine being in Pegasus, but he doesn’t want to.
Rodney returns a heartbeat later, dropping a pair of plastic somethings and two spoons on the table in front of John.
“I told you I have the good jell-o.” Rodney collapses back into the couch and curls in on himself, picks up one of the jell-o cups and rips open the foil covering with typical gusto. “You know, I think jell-o might be one of the greatest inventions ever.”
“Even better than the cyclotron?”
Rodney considers a moment, before finally allowing that it’s close, but the cyclotron probably wins.
“Speaking of cyclotrons and… um, physics things…” John knows Rodney knows when he’s being too casual, even for him; in the corner of his eye, he can see Rodney tensing, flicker of a pause before he dips the spoon in his jell-o cup. “When you’re done unpacking, what’re you going to do with yourself? Got any plans?”
“Not at the moment, no,” Rodney snaps. He jams the spoon in his mouth like he wants to swallow that too, along with more unpleasant words.
“Oh.” The jell-o is slithery and tart on John’s tongue. He swallows, briefly unsettled by the texture. “Me neither. I hope you have a lot of stuff to unpack.”
“Mostly office stuff.” Rodney polishes off the last spoonful, pokes frustratedly at the bottom of the cup, trying to scrape off every last jell-o particle. “And you’re not helping; I’ve seen your office, and you have no concept of efficient organization.”
Rodney’s office is a testament to chaos theory; what seems to be disorder and randomness is, in fact, highly structured at some level that escapes John and his fellow troglodytes entirely. Rodney’s words, not his. John’s not sure how much he believes this.
“So what, I’m just going to be bored?”
“If you think I’m going to let you get back up on that step ladder to put up light fixtures with your face, you’ve got another thing coming.” Foiled in his attempts to extract more jell-o, Rodney sets his cup down. He’s not looking at John but staring at the silent TV with desperate concentration, like the best porn in the world is playing on it and he can’t miss a second. “The house is pretty much set… I mean, it came renovated and everything, and I don’t have much stuff, so… You can, um…” And now he’s looking at John, but that desperation is still there and what the hell is going on John has no idea, “… I meant what I said earlier: you can stay if you want. With me. If you don’t think you’ll be bored out of your mind. Or if, you know, you don’t have anything better to do.”
“Nothing better,” John mutters. It’s true, as true now as it had been this afternoon, when Rodney had not-so-obliquely suggested that John needed looking after.
“Oh.” Rodney blinks, like he honestly hadn’t expected that. And knowing Rodney, he probably hadn’t. “Cool.”
“Yeah.”
And it’s not like he doesn’t have a home of his own to go to, but Rodney’s couch, and the hell with it, Rodney, are more welcoming than base-issued housing.
Rodney celebrates by finishing the rest of John’s jell-o and humming off into his office to move more paper around. John dozes a bit, warm under the blankets and the solid lump of Planck on his chest, lazy with pizza and the exhaustion of a long day, and all around him are the soft sounds of Rodney moving, talking, being there.
He doesn’t really wake up so much as surface briefly when he hears Rodney turning off lights, being quieter than usual.
“Hey,” and Rodney’s voice sounds nice when it’s low, which it never is, and when it is there’s probably something wrong. Not now, John thinks through hazy layers of cotton, because they’re at Rodney’s place. “Hey, I’m going to wake you up every couple of hours.”
Not what John was expecting.
He’s awake now. Very definitely.
“What?” Rodney glares at him. “You had a concussion. A concussion with loss of consciousness. And, in case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have Carson or… or…” And Rodney can’t even bring himself to say it, Atlantis’ medlab. “Anyway, it’s not like I’ve got a trauma center in my basement and you might be developing a subdural hematoma or aneurysm as we speak, and I refuse to wake up tomorrow morning to find that you’ve bled horribly to death all over my couch.”
John agrees, mostly because he knows Rodney will give up after the first two hours spent in paralyzing boredom and go to sleep, and shuffles upstairs to bed. Rodney trails him, almost into the bathroom until John points out he can in fact brush his own ass and wipe his own teeth.
Rodney grimaces, turns an interesting shade of red, and gestures for him to go in.
And the hell of it? Rodney actually sticks to his guns and stays up all night, and, on waking, John’s memories of that night are of a haze of half-sleep, a warm and firm hand on his shoulder shaking him up from the depths of it and Rodney saying, Hey John, come on, wake up, don’t make me shake you harder, and he’s sleepy enough not to realize something important, or if he does, it seems inconsequential, or maybe natural and not a big deal at all.
In the half-dark of his room (half-dark like Atlantis when the moons are full and come through the glass in patterns of dull green and yellow, and oh God he can see it so clearly), he can barely make out Rodney’s face, just the strong, familiar lines of it, and some of the streetlight catches in Rodney’s eyes, silvering them at the corners, something there that John’s never seen but recognizes and can’t think about right now.
* * *
It helps, sort of, that Rodney looks as bad as John feels, scowling into his GeNiUS mug like not even coffee can make the world a better place.
“You shouldn’t have caffeine.”
“Bite me.” John pours a mug – the last of the pot, and the way Rodney’s grimacing, the last coffee left on Earth – and adds sugar.
Rodney sniffs at that, because coffee is meant to be drunk as black as space.
“So what are we doing today?” John asks. He pours in a bit more sugar just to watch Rodney’s face contort.
“‘We.’ and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I,’ are going to…” Rodney pauses and blinks. “You know, I have no idea. My office is mostly unpacked, but I can take care of that pretty quickly.”
John doesn’t mention the laptops and desktop moldering away in their cases, or the fact that the light fixture in Rodney’s room still needs to be installed.
And man, that sounds so fucking stupid. Installing light fixtures, when What are we doing today? usually got answered with “Save the city, save the galaxy, cheat certain death, introduce Teyla and Ronon to no-holds-barred Monopoly, cheat certain death again, possibly all at the same time.” And now? Now… It’s Putting Up Light Fixtures on Planet Earth.
“You should take it easy,” Rodney says after a moment, decisively. “That subdural hematoma could go at any moment.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” John grunts into his coffee.
“Well, since I can’t exercise tyranny over Radek and the rest of the minions…” Full-stop, which John’s used to from Rodney, but most times it’s only a pause to switch tracks onto a new digression, but this… This is going on too long, too tense, and when John focuses on Rodney again, Rodney’s mouth is tight with something that would, in any other person, probably be something like irritation, but John’s been next to Rodney at enough funerals to recognize sadness.
Rodney’s eyes are soft and distant with it.
“I should…” Rodney breaks the moment with a violent gesture, spilling coffee in the general direction of his office, and is off in a blur of blue-bathrobed agitation, leaving echoing silence behind.
“That sucked,” John tells his own mug. The coffee is overpoweringly sweet and he dumps the rest of it. Hangs out in the kitchen and hunts up breakfast for lack of anything better to do, and listens to Rodney in the office, rattling away like enough noise can drown out what it feels like to remember loss.
* * *
It’s Rodney who does it, predictably, who bowls over O’Neill and Hammond and Landry because Rodney will never take no for an answer, though the SGC higher-ups have managed to do what four years of Wraith, replicators, and Genii couldn’t.
They’ll lose Atlantis, but Atlantis won’t be lost.
“So we’re clear on the terms,” O’Neill says, staring at the three of them: Elizabeth, John, Rodney, whose mouth is tight with determination. “You’ll erase all information pertaining to Earth and the Milky Way from the database.”
“And the gate address to Earth,” Rodney says gracelessly, tone calculated to piss O’Neill off to the point of reneging on their bargain.
John feels a bit better, hearing that Rodneyesque defiance. Not much, but right now Rodney looks like he always does when confronted with certain doom, eyes hard and will set, and Death will just have to back the fuck down.
But not much pisses O’Neill off if he doesn’t want to be pissed off, and he doesn’t back down; he only smiles as he details the rest of their ‘agreement.’ Elizabeth’s fine face is drawn with resignation, Rodney’s jaw clenched against a fierce anger John finds too easy to recognize.
“And you will come back on the Daedalus,” Hammond adds. It’s not a question. Caldwell, grey and superior, is standing behind Hammond’s shoulder, and it’s too easy to think back to when they – Caldwell, John, Elizabeth – were barely on the right side of being allies.
Rodney nods, a sharp jerk of his chin. O’Neill’s glare wrests reluctant admission from Elizabeth; John waits a moment before giving his, adding his own yes, sir after a pause to let O’Neill know he doesn’t want to go along with this.
Because it means giving Atlantis up. Sinking her, hiding her under her shield again, and walking away forever.
* * *
.>.
By: HF
Email: aesc36 @gmail.com
Pairing: McKay/Sheppard, preslashish
Rating/Warning: PG13 for bad words, angst
Disclaimer: Not mine.
Advertisements: Follow-up to Late Feet, from John's POV. Spoilers for "Tao of Rodney."
Word Count: 15,437
Notes: This is a quiet story.
I’M A STRANGER HERE MYSELF
It isn’t supposed to end like this, in anger so thick and hot it clogs his throat, and in between denial all he’s been able to think for the past two days is don’t let them see don’t let them don’t let them even though he’s pretty sure they know, because they have to know what they’re doing to him.
He’s relieved Rodney, Elizabeth, and the others aren’t here for this, that it’s only him and O’Neill, whose face is stripped of sarcasm and who’s watching him quietly.
“Four years on Atlantis... That’s a good tour,” O’Neill says, though four years can’t even hope to encapsulate everything that’s happened – Wraith and death and loss and finding. Home, something military kids never know. O’Neill watches him attentively, not obviously sympathetic, but kind in his own, rough way.
That only makes John angrier. His uniform clings to him like dead skin, and he barely has enough control to keep from tugging at his collar and cuffs.
“We can transfer you to another assignment – not with the SGC, of course, but another base. Stateside.” Nothing dangerous, he means, not with any of the active units still fighting out in the Middle East, nowhere he can go to kill himself. “Or, if you want, you’re eligible for retirement.” O’Neill’s thin lips turn up in a quick grin. “You’ve done your country proud. Maybe even your planet.”
There’s enough anger in him to accept retirement – no, not accept it, to choose it because he sure as hell isn’t accepting any of this – to say I’ll take that sir, thank you, choosing between the Wraith and the hard place.
When he gets back to his quarters, he doesn’t tear things apart, though he really wants to. Anonymous, all of it, his bed neatly made, foot locker organized, the few things he’d been allowed to bring with him (and the few things he’d smuggled in) stowed away, nothing to say what he’s been through and what’s been taken away. Ten deep breaths stand between him and breaking everything he can get his hands on, ten breaths and the silence between them, to sink into quiet and reason and feel his blood run calm again.
Adrenaline quivers at the edge of his awareness, blurring everything, but he can focus a bit, lucid enough to realize he’s a civilian for the first time in his life, to realize everything that comes with that – not freedom, service to his country done, but no nothing, no direction.
He could go back, he knows, tell O’Neill he’s reconsidered. It’s the logical thing to do, Rodney would say, you’re human and therefore presumably reasonable, I think, so go and ask for a transfer, and stay in the air.
Anger’s no longer in the picture, but pride is. A lot of pride, but then John Sheppard’s always had too much for his own good, and he doesn’t go looking for O’Neill again.
He wakes to piercing, painful brightness, and a face looming close over his, light behind it making a nimbus and obscuring sight, like staring straight into an eclipse.
“That Lucky Old Sun” rolls around in his head for a moment along with all the other loose thoughts, like where the hell he is and what happened.
The smell of old blood and antiseptics hits a moment later.
Infirmary? But Atlantis has better ventilation, though you can’t ever escape the scent of ocean and ozone.
Hospital. Earth. He’s an expert at ignoring disappointment. The only question now is what happened.
The doctor tells him, of course: fell off a step ladder, you lost consciousness and your friend called 911, good for him, and now we shall take you to radiology to make sure bits of skull haven’t lodged in your brain.
Rodney, John thinks, still hung up on your friend called 911. Rodney had done that.
A moment later: step ladder. He can’t recall what happened, but he remembers standing at the top of the ladder, peering into the bowels of the light fixture, realizing he’d need another screw… And that was it.
Step ladder. He winces and the doctor asks him if he’s okay. John doesn’t even try to nod, because that will cause his head to fall off his shoulders. He grunts instead.
Rodney will never, ever, in a million billion years, let him hear the end of this.
Ever.
They don’t get a ride back from the hospital in the ambulance, which disappoints John immensely. The taxi driver who takes them back to Rodney’s place is probably disappointed, too; he speeds off the second Rodney’s feet hit the curb, almost before Rodney can slam the door shut, and Rodney’s two-dollar tip flutters abandoned to the concrete.
“You know, you leave Earth for four years and they replace the human population with subliterate assholes,” Rodney grumbles as he grabs the money and stuffs it in a pocket. “Let’s go.”
John can feel Rodney’s presence at his back and knows that Rodney really wants to walk faster, because Rodney has this thing against going slowly when there’s so much to be done, but really, John’s head still hurts and his shoulders feel like Teyla and Ronon have been beating on him with, oh, titanium versions of their sticks. The back of his head feels like a replicator brainfuck orgy.
“Are you okay?” Rodney demands, inches away from his ear. He prods John out of the way to unlock the front door and push it open. Planck the cat rushes to greet them, yowling furiously, and Rodney takes a moment to soothe him – yes, this idiot fell off a ladder, I’m sorry he’s a moron, I’ll feed you, poor boy – before turning back to John and eyeing him narrowly. “You don’t look okay. You look green. Shit green.”
“Fine,” John mumbles, trying very hard not to think about shit green. The rush of cold air from inside nearly makes him ill. “Just peachy.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Sheppard, sit down before you fall down.” Coming from Rodney, this is an expression of deepest concern.
Rodney propels John through the front door and in the direction of the couch with a hand that’s warm and firm on John’s back.
John trails over, wondering if this was how Rodney’s minions felt, glad that the living room is right off the foyer and the couch within easy stumbling distance. There’s no escape from Rodney, John’s noisy, opinionated shadow, issuing half-coherent editorials on American health care and Denver traffic, and setting the prescription bottle and mostly-gone chocolate shake on the coffee table.
John collapses into the couch, likes how the old leather gives under his weight. It’s a great couch, kind of like Rodney: padded, sturdy, lived-in. Comforting, and that’s a strange thought to think about Rodney McKay.
Then again, John’s comparing a couch to him, so he’s not winning any points for mental clarity.
Planck leaps up on the back of the couch and curls up, eyeing John the entire time. At least he’s not trying to nest on John’s head, which is annoying and painful (Planck has all his claws) and which Rodney finds hilarious.
A series of random thumps and rustles comes from the hall closet, then the clatter of keys landing on a table, Rodney stomping upstairs to get something. The house is old, creaky, and Rodney’s feet sound like a herd of elephants, bang crash bang, making the base of John’s skull throb in counterpoint. He winces and shuts his eyes against the sound and the light in the living room, which has abruptly become solar-flare bright.
Bang crash bang down the stairs, footsteps, and then something fluffy and warm lands on top of him. Curious enough to risk the pain, John cracks one eye open.
Synthetic fleece blanket. Blankets, John corrects. Dark blue and green – field issue? They look like it – and smelling like detergent.
“Do you think you can manage to sleep without falling off the couch?” Rodney asks, staring narrowly at him. “I have to work down here, and I don’t want to worry about you strangling yourself in the sheets or something similarly idiotic.”
“I think I can manage not to kill myself,” John says faintly, overcome by Rodney’s take-no-prisoners brand of concern.
“Okay.” Rodney doesn’t sound terribly convinced, and he hovers a moment, something indecisive there in his eyes that John can’t quite interpret.
And that’s crazy because John’s got the Rodney McKay Decoder Ring. But all he’s getting now is indecision and faint confusion, which is weird when not accompanied by indignation, because Rodney seems to take confusion as a personal insult.
“Okay,” Rodney says again and stalks off. “Finish your fake milkshake thing.”
They’d stopped at a fast-food place under the guise of John needing something in his stomach but being too weak and infirm to handle solid food. Mostly though it had been for Rodney, who’d downed half of it in two gulps before complaining not-quite-subvocally about brain freeze the rest of the way home.
John ignores the milkshake commandment, because his stomach is still deeply unhappy about the taxi ride and part of him is still on Atlantis time, and insisting that it’s somewhere around 2000 hours and it’s movie night, so all it wants is popcorn. He tries to ignore that thought and shifts around to a more comfortable position, one that doesn’t aggravate the scorpion coiled at the bottom of his skull.
(Seriously, that’s what it feels like, a goddamned scorpion.)
The couch smells like old leather and something else, warm and familiar. Planck purrs rustily, like he isn’t used to it, and kneads the leather with soft snaps of his claws.
John drifts for a bit listening to the thumps and rustlings coming from Rodney’s office, the occasional soft cry of delight or irritation. Sometimes he senses Rodney passing by, like a storm in the distance – crackle of far-off energy – and from time to time there’s a pause, and John can tell Rodney’s watching him.
It should make him feel weird but it doesn’t, and weirdly enough, that’s what weirds him out.
But then Rodney goes back to work, shuffles and murmurs, his presence uncharacteristically soft.
No computers in the office yet. No computers in Rodney’s bedroom either, and John would have thought the first thing Rodney would have set up would be the wireless LAN and a fiendishly complicated network so he could get back to research after six months of SGC debriefing and discharge. But Rodney’s laptops are still in their cases, and there’s a brand-new computer still in its box out in the hall, and John knows it hasn’t been opened.
Two weeks Rodney’s been here, according to the latest, reluctantly-given information from Sam Carter – which goes to show you that while you can leave the SGC it never leaves you – and Rodney doesn’t seem to be terribly interested in picking up where he left off.
But left off is Atlantis, locked away from them forever.
That thought hurts more than the concussion or the dull ache in his shoulders.
He curls around the pain, not sure if he’s defending himself or trying to lock it away, deep, way down deep where it can’t hurt anymore.
Think about something else, anything, about the private embarrassment of looking up directions to Rodney’s place and then getting spectacularly lost, getting back on the interstate and going east instead of west and not realizing it until driving back through Denver (which he’d thought he’d left twenty minutes ago), and then turning the wrong way onto Rodney’s street. He tries to picture the expression on Rodney’s face if he ever found out – and John will never confess to this in a million, billion years – and Rodney’s face would be a mixture of condescension, humor, and a complete lack of surprise.
(Well, there would be surprise, but it would mostly be surprise at the thought that John has managed to stay alive this long despite his crippling lack of intelligence.)
Anyway, he’d finally made it, and pulled up in Rodney’s driveway, staring up at the neat white two-story with its black trim, old-fashioned and sort of… graceful, in a practical way Rodney probably appreciates. He’d walked to the door and rung the bell and waited, unable to keep back a grin just thinking about Rodney’s face.
Sheppard? Priceless and still completely expected: Rodney’s eyes wide and amazed and blue, as though witnessing a spatial anomaly materializing on his doorstep.
Hey, McKay.
John goes with these thoughts for a while, memories merging into half-wakefulness and dozing, where he can hear Rodney in the here and now talking to himself and hear Rodney talking to him over last night’s dinner, explaining how John is completely doing something the wrong way and it needs to be like this, Sheppard, honestly were you raised by the Lost Tribe of People without Opposable Thumbs?, explaining to him all the reasons why he isn’t allowed to die, ever.
Here and now-Rodney walks swiftly by, at least trying to be quiet this time, muttered and incomprehensible comments trailing behind him. If he ignores the couch and the blankets and the being horizontal, John can pretend he’s in the lab, watching as Rodney zings and darts about like a demented Canadian hummingbird, pausing for heartbeats to stare at hieroglyphics, deliver a tirade or sigh happily, and then go kazooming off again. He can pretend he smells the air, tickle of ozone and ocean and salt that the filtration systems never quite scrub out, and ignoring the darkness he can see Rodney turning toward him with a triumphant grin as he prepares to explain how he, Rodney McKay, is the world’s greatest genius.
Hey, Sheppard, Rodney would say, check this out. And he’d point to something John might not understand, but even if he did, John would say, Uh, what am I looking at, McKay? just to watch Rodney draw himself up in annoyance and superiority, and start to lecture.
A louder-than-normal curse jolts him out of not-Atlantis, and John’s back on the couch again, with a headache and upset stomach, and Rodney’s back in his office, slamming a file drawer shut.
When he finds sleep again, he doesn’t dream of Atlantis or anything else, just a half-awareness of worn leather under one cheek and blankets that smell like astrophysicist and regular Tide.
He wakes up to more Rodney bellowing.
“Are you planning to take root out there or something?” Rodney shouts from the kitchen. John winces; Rodney’s voice really carries, grates against the ache low in his skull. “Come on and help me with dinner.”
“What happened to the weak and infirm?” John makes his eyes focus on his watch. It’s somewhere around six, but the digital numbers don’t want to unfuzz for him and remain stubbornly blurry.
“Shut up and get in here.”
John’s vision swims briefly as he stands – okay, maybe not so okay after all – and he needs a moment to catch both breath and balance. The silence from the kitchen becomes expectant, as though Rodney’s been waiting twenty minutes now and is wondering where John’s gotten to, if he has, in fact, managed to get lost in the space between kitchen and living room. Any day now, Colonel telegraphs itself clearly across the ten feet or so between John and the doorway, like Rodney’s thoughts are loud enough to be spoken words.
He’s missed that, John thinks absently. In a weird, masochistic way, he’s missed Rodney’s louder-than-shouting silences.
Rodney’s standing at his kitchen counter, a collection of take-out and delivery menus of all nationalities and ethnicities spread out in front of him. John knows there’s a decided preference for Italian, and Rodney distrusts Chinese on principle, because of Mandarin oranges.
There’s also a distinct lack of cutlery, cooking devices, and unprepared food.
“Um, where’s the dinner…” John indicates the counter. “Stuff.”
Rodney stares at him blankly and gestures to the menus. “This is dinner. Or will be, as soon as you tell me what you want so I can order.”
“Okay then.”
Pause, rewind.
“Wait a minute… You’re letting me pick dinner?”
“Well, yeah.” The blank look is still there, but rapidly shifts to defensiveness. “What about it?”
“I’ve been here a week, and this is the first time you’ve let me pick dinner.”
“So?” Rodney bristles, his mouth lengthening in annoyance. “Maybe I’m feeling charitable.”
John thinks about teasing Rodney over this, but really, Rodney’s letting him pick dinner, which means John can pick a place that serves limes marinaded in orange juice and served with a side of lemons and Rodney, though he would bitch about it, loudly and at great length, wouldn’t renege.
“Pizza,” John says, and points to the Quattro Canti menu. Expensive but good, not a hint of citrus or anything Rodney considers a mortal insult to pizza (especially pineapple), and Rodney’s face lights up, and John has to grin, seeing that.
John dozes and Rodney works until the pizza comes, and then they sit together on Rodney’s couch and eat, because pizza should be eaten on the couch and Rodney’s kitchen table is covered with papers and files. The sign of a proper academic, Rodney had explained just after threatening to cut John’s hands off if he touched a single thing.
Other nights, they’d be fighting over what to watch on TV, but John’s eyes can’t take much more than the faint light from the lamp on the end table, and Rodney for once seems to tolerate the quiet, not trying to fill it with disquisitions on Denver traffic, the overwhelming idiocy of the astrophysics community, his research – because, John’s starting to suspect, he isn’t doing any – and anything else Rodney’s brain vomits up from the depths.
Instead they just sit there while John picks his way through two slices of pizza and Rodney inhales five, and then they sit there some more.
At last, Rodney breaks.
“Just to reiterate from earlier, you’re not allowed to do that again,” he says in an odd, tight little voice. “House rules.”
“I won’t,” John promises, pretty sure he’s promising not to fall off another step ladder or any other seemingly innocuous household device.
“You’re out on your ass if you do.”
“Got it.”
Rodney heaves himself to his feet and wanders off to the kitchen, much in the way of Rodney whenever he’d made his point and didn’t want to talk about it anymore.
John listens to familiar Rodney-noises coming from the kitchen, an incoherent monologue that doesn’t require John’s participation, and wonders if it’s a sign of dependency (or whatever Heightmeyer would call it) that he can’t imagine being anywhere else but Rodney’s old leather couch right now.
He can imagine being in Pegasus, but he doesn’t want to.
Rodney returns a heartbeat later, dropping a pair of plastic somethings and two spoons on the table in front of John.
“I told you I have the good jell-o.” Rodney collapses back into the couch and curls in on himself, picks up one of the jell-o cups and rips open the foil covering with typical gusto. “You know, I think jell-o might be one of the greatest inventions ever.”
“Even better than the cyclotron?”
Rodney considers a moment, before finally allowing that it’s close, but the cyclotron probably wins.
“Speaking of cyclotrons and… um, physics things…” John knows Rodney knows when he’s being too casual, even for him; in the corner of his eye, he can see Rodney tensing, flicker of a pause before he dips the spoon in his jell-o cup. “When you’re done unpacking, what’re you going to do with yourself? Got any plans?”
“Not at the moment, no,” Rodney snaps. He jams the spoon in his mouth like he wants to swallow that too, along with more unpleasant words.
“Oh.” The jell-o is slithery and tart on John’s tongue. He swallows, briefly unsettled by the texture. “Me neither. I hope you have a lot of stuff to unpack.”
“Mostly office stuff.” Rodney polishes off the last spoonful, pokes frustratedly at the bottom of the cup, trying to scrape off every last jell-o particle. “And you’re not helping; I’ve seen your office, and you have no concept of efficient organization.”
Rodney’s office is a testament to chaos theory; what seems to be disorder and randomness is, in fact, highly structured at some level that escapes John and his fellow troglodytes entirely. Rodney’s words, not his. John’s not sure how much he believes this.
“So what, I’m just going to be bored?”
“If you think I’m going to let you get back up on that step ladder to put up light fixtures with your face, you’ve got another thing coming.” Foiled in his attempts to extract more jell-o, Rodney sets his cup down. He’s not looking at John but staring at the silent TV with desperate concentration, like the best porn in the world is playing on it and he can’t miss a second. “The house is pretty much set… I mean, it came renovated and everything, and I don’t have much stuff, so… You can, um…” And now he’s looking at John, but that desperation is still there and what the hell is going on John has no idea, “… I meant what I said earlier: you can stay if you want. With me. If you don’t think you’ll be bored out of your mind. Or if, you know, you don’t have anything better to do.”
“Nothing better,” John mutters. It’s true, as true now as it had been this afternoon, when Rodney had not-so-obliquely suggested that John needed looking after.
“Oh.” Rodney blinks, like he honestly hadn’t expected that. And knowing Rodney, he probably hadn’t. “Cool.”
“Yeah.”
And it’s not like he doesn’t have a home of his own to go to, but Rodney’s couch, and the hell with it, Rodney, are more welcoming than base-issued housing.
Rodney celebrates by finishing the rest of John’s jell-o and humming off into his office to move more paper around. John dozes a bit, warm under the blankets and the solid lump of Planck on his chest, lazy with pizza and the exhaustion of a long day, and all around him are the soft sounds of Rodney moving, talking, being there.
He doesn’t really wake up so much as surface briefly when he hears Rodney turning off lights, being quieter than usual.
“Hey,” and Rodney’s voice sounds nice when it’s low, which it never is, and when it is there’s probably something wrong. Not now, John thinks through hazy layers of cotton, because they’re at Rodney’s place. “Hey, I’m going to wake you up every couple of hours.”
Not what John was expecting.
He’s awake now. Very definitely.
“What?” Rodney glares at him. “You had a concussion. A concussion with loss of consciousness. And, in case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have Carson or… or…” And Rodney can’t even bring himself to say it, Atlantis’ medlab. “Anyway, it’s not like I’ve got a trauma center in my basement and you might be developing a subdural hematoma or aneurysm as we speak, and I refuse to wake up tomorrow morning to find that you’ve bled horribly to death all over my couch.”
John agrees, mostly because he knows Rodney will give up after the first two hours spent in paralyzing boredom and go to sleep, and shuffles upstairs to bed. Rodney trails him, almost into the bathroom until John points out he can in fact brush his own ass and wipe his own teeth.
Rodney grimaces, turns an interesting shade of red, and gestures for him to go in.
And the hell of it? Rodney actually sticks to his guns and stays up all night, and, on waking, John’s memories of that night are of a haze of half-sleep, a warm and firm hand on his shoulder shaking him up from the depths of it and Rodney saying, Hey John, come on, wake up, don’t make me shake you harder, and he’s sleepy enough not to realize something important, or if he does, it seems inconsequential, or maybe natural and not a big deal at all.
In the half-dark of his room (half-dark like Atlantis when the moons are full and come through the glass in patterns of dull green and yellow, and oh God he can see it so clearly), he can barely make out Rodney’s face, just the strong, familiar lines of it, and some of the streetlight catches in Rodney’s eyes, silvering them at the corners, something there that John’s never seen but recognizes and can’t think about right now.
It helps, sort of, that Rodney looks as bad as John feels, scowling into his GeNiUS mug like not even coffee can make the world a better place.
“You shouldn’t have caffeine.”
“Bite me.” John pours a mug – the last of the pot, and the way Rodney’s grimacing, the last coffee left on Earth – and adds sugar.
Rodney sniffs at that, because coffee is meant to be drunk as black as space.
“So what are we doing today?” John asks. He pours in a bit more sugar just to watch Rodney’s face contort.
“‘We.’ and by ‘we’ I mean ‘I,’ are going to…” Rodney pauses and blinks. “You know, I have no idea. My office is mostly unpacked, but I can take care of that pretty quickly.”
John doesn’t mention the laptops and desktop moldering away in their cases, or the fact that the light fixture in Rodney’s room still needs to be installed.
And man, that sounds so fucking stupid. Installing light fixtures, when What are we doing today? usually got answered with “Save the city, save the galaxy, cheat certain death, introduce Teyla and Ronon to no-holds-barred Monopoly, cheat certain death again, possibly all at the same time.” And now? Now… It’s Putting Up Light Fixtures on Planet Earth.
“You should take it easy,” Rodney says after a moment, decisively. “That subdural hematoma could go at any moment.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” John grunts into his coffee.
“Well, since I can’t exercise tyranny over Radek and the rest of the minions…” Full-stop, which John’s used to from Rodney, but most times it’s only a pause to switch tracks onto a new digression, but this… This is going on too long, too tense, and when John focuses on Rodney again, Rodney’s mouth is tight with something that would, in any other person, probably be something like irritation, but John’s been next to Rodney at enough funerals to recognize sadness.
Rodney’s eyes are soft and distant with it.
“I should…” Rodney breaks the moment with a violent gesture, spilling coffee in the general direction of his office, and is off in a blur of blue-bathrobed agitation, leaving echoing silence behind.
“That sucked,” John tells his own mug. The coffee is overpoweringly sweet and he dumps the rest of it. Hangs out in the kitchen and hunts up breakfast for lack of anything better to do, and listens to Rodney in the office, rattling away like enough noise can drown out what it feels like to remember loss.
It’s Rodney who does it, predictably, who bowls over O’Neill and Hammond and Landry because Rodney will never take no for an answer, though the SGC higher-ups have managed to do what four years of Wraith, replicators, and Genii couldn’t.
They’ll lose Atlantis, but Atlantis won’t be lost.
“So we’re clear on the terms,” O’Neill says, staring at the three of them: Elizabeth, John, Rodney, whose mouth is tight with determination. “You’ll erase all information pertaining to Earth and the Milky Way from the database.”
“And the gate address to Earth,” Rodney says gracelessly, tone calculated to piss O’Neill off to the point of reneging on their bargain.
John feels a bit better, hearing that Rodneyesque defiance. Not much, but right now Rodney looks like he always does when confronted with certain doom, eyes hard and will set, and Death will just have to back the fuck down.
But not much pisses O’Neill off if he doesn’t want to be pissed off, and he doesn’t back down; he only smiles as he details the rest of their ‘agreement.’ Elizabeth’s fine face is drawn with resignation, Rodney’s jaw clenched against a fierce anger John finds too easy to recognize.
“And you will come back on the Daedalus,” Hammond adds. It’s not a question. Caldwell, grey and superior, is standing behind Hammond’s shoulder, and it’s too easy to think back to when they – Caldwell, John, Elizabeth – were barely on the right side of being allies.
Rodney nods, a sharp jerk of his chin. O’Neill’s glare wrests reluctant admission from Elizabeth; John waits a moment before giving his, adding his own yes, sir after a pause to let O’Neill know he doesn’t want to go along with this.
Because it means giving Atlantis up. Sinking her, hiding her under her shield again, and walking away forever.
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