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.fic: I'm a Stranger Here Myself - McKay/Sheppard (PG13) 2.3
.<.
* * *
Later that day, they end up going to a Super Colossal Targ-Mart or Wal-Get or something like that – something obscenely outsized and guaranteed to be a madhouse on Saturday afternoon – because Rodney’s decided to repaint his office. Yeah, that office, the office he just finished setting up today, in the house that had been renovated before Rodney’d bought it.
“Off-white is the most ridiculous color in the world,” Rodney says for the fifteenth time, though the last time John had pointed out that Rodney’ll have to move everything was about ten minutes ago. “And seriously, that room looks like it hosted an Incontinence Day Celebration.”
“It does,” John agrees. The office had been a playroom in a former incarnation, painted eggshell-white with pale yellow sun-shaped stencils.
“And you’ll have to help me with everything, especially the bookcases,” Rodney adds. “The movers took care of it all last time, and there’s no possible way I can move those bookcases by myself.” He slams the car door shut to emphasize this.
Privately John thinks there’s no way the two of them could move those bookcases, four solid oak monstrosities that Rodney’s had since graduate school. They could probably inch them away from the wall and try to paint behind them, but anything else was probably begging for a hernia, and the both of them being sidelined on Rodney’s couch.
He says this, and Rodney self-consciously runs one hand through his hair, as though checking to be sure it’s all there, and in doing so making it stand up even more. It’s a bit lighter now, though six months can’t be long enough for it to thin out more than when John had seen Rodney last, in a debriefing room at SGC.
The walk across the parking lot seems as long as some of their off-world hikes, complete with unexpected dangers – homicidal natives in SUVs, shopping carts running wild, bored vacationing teenagers loitering by their cars and eyeing Rodney with interest and disdain (and Rodney, John knows, could destroy them, just thinking about it), a jerk in a Corvette too busy with his cell phone to watch where he’s going.
“Asshole,” Rodney mutters passionately, glaring at the back of the driver’s head. “I wish I had a P90.” He slants a speculative look at John. “You carrying?”
“Left it in my other pants.”
“Crap.”
Rodney stalks along just behind John’s left shoulder between eight and nine o’clock. Like how they used to walk, John on point, and it’s easy to feel Teyla at his six, Ronon – or maybe Ford – checking their backtrail, to hear the endless stream of geek-jabber and complaints from Rodney, but mostly just feeling him there, fitting into the Rodney-shaped place in John’s awareness.
Teyla and Ronon, back in Pegasus, and no way was John ever going to find out what had happened or will happen to them. Ford, Grodin, Stackhouse, Markham, too many other Marines, Athosians, all of them over there forever, and it should freak him out that he’s jealous of them, but it doesn’t.
You aren’t allowed to obsess about this, he tells himself, hating the way his thoughts have been slanting off ever since he got here a week ago. Not that he’s been doing a great job of keeping them on track since he’d left the Air Force, but there you go.
Worse around Rodney, like putting lemon juice and salt in the wound, just for the tingle of that feels kind of good after the screaming fuckfuckfuckHURT fades a bit.
They make it inside and Rodney beelines for the coffee shop. There’s coffee shop in this thing, Starbucks even, John thinks dazedly as he orders coffee he really doesn’t need, equipped with enough espresso drinks to supply Rodney for ten safaris through the store.
“I need coffee to deal with this.” Rodney’s chin indicates the Saturday afternoon insanity of American consumerism. “Seriously, this was probably a mistake.”
Mistake or not, Rodney and his espresso-fueled self take no prisoners as he grabs a shopping cart and plows through the aisles, and in Rodney’s hands the cart becomes a battering ram and bumper car. John can’t help grinning because it’s so familiar, better almost than Rodney’s running commentary on the evils of American capitalism and the average intelligence (or lack thereof) of the human locusts currently infesting the store.
For his part, John gives up apologizing and follows Rodney around, tossing random items into the cart and trying not to feel like a huge, stumbling freak. He’d spent the better part of his six months of downtime on base, foraging for food at the BX before his papers had gone through, and that hadn’t prepared him for shopping as full-contact sport.
It hadn’t prepared him for a lot of things, being a civilian again, for being here on a summer afternoon and helping Rodney mow down helpless old women and small armies of five-year-olds. He tries to smile apologetically and gives up on that too, wondering if people think he’s as weird, as out of place, as he feels.
“You made that kid cry,” John points out as they finally – finally – make it to the housewares and hardware section. “And I think those two women from back in the produce aisle are following us.”
Rodney glances over his shoulder. “They’re probably stalking you. Honestly, how did you manage to age so well? It’s not fair to the rest of us.” He blinks, turns bright red, and begins to study the selection of paint.
He ends up choosing blue.
It probably has a more complicated name, like “Dusty Cobalt” or “Mystic Ocean,” but it’s a deep, matte blue, Lantean-sky blue, when all the moons are out and it isn’t quite full night yet.
* * *
“We don’t need to rush this,” Rodney’s saying as he unpacks the paint, drop cloths, and rollers. “It’s better to go slow and do well than hurry things.”
“This from the man who wants everything done yesterday? That’s pretty rich.” John’s sacked out on the couch, watching Rodney fuss over plastic bags and the mail.
“Yeah, well, you still have a concussion,” Rodney says, leaning so heavily on concussion John wonders if the word will snap. He straightens, hitching at khakis that barely – barely – cover the strip of blue boxer shorts. “You probably shouldn’t think about inhaling paint fumes right now.” Pause, and Rodney’s looking at him now, smirking, and hey, that’s John’s smirk. His, and Rodney never asked permission to borrow it. “Besides, this involves step ladders, and your track record with them isn’t exactly stellar.”
“Fuck you, McKay.”
“You’re just saying that because you know I’m right.”
That’s pretty much true, and John really can’t say anything to that.
Rodney abandons the equipment in the study in favor of wandering back out into the living room to collapse onto the couch and look over the mail. John quickly retracts his feet before they get crushed. Typical, of course, that Rodney doesn’t even apologize – or notice – too busy sifting through the stack of envelopes with impatient speed.
“Anything good?”
“Just crap.” Rodney tosses the pile of envelopes onto the coffee table. “Speaking of which, did you need to go back to your place or something? You know, to pick up your mail and stuff?”
You know, your life? The one they say you’re supposed to have?
“Nah.” He pays all his bills online, and unless it’s a letter saying the SGC has reinstated the Atlantis expedition, he’s not interested in hearing about it.
“Oh.” Rodney sounds sort of pleased by that, but when John looks up to double-check, Rodney’s staring fixedly at the small pile of envelopes again, flicking through them with the devotion he usually reserves for solving the equations that stand between them and certain death. “Junk… junk… electric bill… junk…”
John snags the last one.
“Princeton?” he asks, examining the return address. “Doesn’t look like junk to me.”
“It’s probably from the alumni association,” Rodney sniffs. “Vampires.”
“You never went to Princeton,” John tells him. He knows this because he can remember every single one of the degrees Rodney had posted on the wall of his quarters. He hasn’t seen those degrees since they’d packed the last time, but he remembers. The only thing from the Wall of Fame that Rodney’s put up again is his autographed photo of Earth that had been taken on a Discovery space walk.
Rodney had designed an improved solar panel for a satellite, and the crew had installed it on that spacewalk. John knows all about it, because Rodney can recite the story like reciting the Iliad.
“Then it’s probably from someone I know there.”
“Like who?”
“Who cares? Give it back.”
Rodney reaches for the envelope, but John’s quick on the evasion, twisting around on the couch and fending off Rodney with both feet and one hand while mangling the envelope open with the other hand and his teeth. He wants to laugh, because dammit, it’s five years old and stupid and fun, and because anger has Rodney’s face twisted up in all sorts of knots, blue eyes snapping with it.
“Sheppard!” Rodney squawks. “John, dammit! That’s a felony, tampering with someone else’s mail! Give it!”
“This’ll be good,” John says, loud enough to provoke another indignant sound from Rodney, who’s pressing against John’s feet and forcing his knees toward his chest. “C’mon, McKay, what’s the big deal? They’re just asking for money.”
“Asshole.” Rodney slumps back, rubbing at his stomach. “Will you give me my letter back, please? Now that you’ve probably caused an ulcer to rupture or whatever.”
“Now?” John stares at him. “No way.”
Over Rodney’s protests and despite one more desperate flail at the envelope, he pulls out a piece of paper, Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies letterhead, and reads.
“Shit. Fuck. Rodney, they’re offering you a fellowship. A pure research fellowship.” He’s not an academic, but he’s spent enough time on the geek side of the Force to know what that means: no teaching, just… well, pure research. Rodney’s dream job, if you took Atlantis out of the picture.
“I know,” Rodney says quietly, looking anywhere but at John and the piece of paper in his hand.
“You know?” John stares at him, and left field definitely applies here – curve ball, fall off a step ladder, any unexpected event that ends in pain and consternation.
“Radek called me just after I moved here.” Rodney sort of curls in on himself, hunching up like he does when he’s too upset to be pissed off. “He’s doing research at Cornell now, and knows someone on the Institute fellowship committee. He, um, found out before they made the final selections.”
“Rodney, this is really cool.” Except it isn’t, really, and John doesn’t even want to think about why, that it has to do with staying and the look on Rodney’s face last night, and things not changing any more than they already had. “You going to take it?”
“No, I’m not.”
And Rodney says it like that’s that, thank you drive through, and hauls himself up and vanishes into the kitchen.
They’re not going to talk about this, John knows, though Rodney’s unhappiness shouts itself hoarse from two rooms away, and continues to shout for the rest of the afternoon while John pretends to sleep and read Anna Karenina.
Not like he ever finished War and Peace, but whatever.
Rodney offers détente by letting John pick out dinner again, and John picks an Indian place he knows Rodney likes because they don’t go overboard with the spices and the rice is free.
* * *
While cleaning up after dinner – which mostly means stuffing things in the dishwasher and putting the take-out stuff back in the drawer, John finds a crumpled wad of paper buried among the pizza menus and pulls it out.
“Spatial Topography, Wormholes, and the Problem of Quantum Gravity,” by R. McKay.
He settles in at the counter to read, absently pulling up a bar stool, sponge forgotten on the sideboard.
It’s oddly like reading Rodney’s diary, seeing this other part of his friend, the part that speaks in measured sentences, precise, no flashy gestures, the side that wins fellowships and awards, the smart without the hysteria. Yet it’s also so much Rodney: logic, inexorable logic, and everything’s so clear, you Sheppards, you lesser scientists, if you would only look and really see.
He doesn’t understand much of what Rodney’s saying, the equations like a foreign language he can barely remember speaking – high-school Spanish, the smattering of local dialects from Afghanistan – but it’s elegant, clean-lined even with Rodney’s illegible, half-smeared scribbles in the margins and the occasional smudges of ink.
And he remembers this vaguely, remembers Rodney stomping into his room in the hospital, spitting indignation and worry and gripping a small sheaf of papers. He’d dropped them and his house keys on the bed, and had stared at John like he’d been the Problem of Quantum Gravity.
… and I wouldn’t want your death to get in the way of you staying at my place for a bit longer, Rodney had said, and there’d been something there like discovery, faint wonderment hidden just under Rodney’s annoyance, something that warms John and dizzies and discomfits him at the same time.
The look Rodney’d had last night, waking John up, unguarded and thinking maybe John was too out of it to recognize that look.
Dizziness turns to a quick shiver, something incongruous and warm lighting up in some indefinable place somewhere inside him. Contentment, sitting here, anticipation, thinking about that expression on Rodney’s face, confusion and not minding it, weird alchemy he can’t parse out.
He reads a bit more, mostly because it’s something Rodney’s written and not because he understands any of it, though he can grasp the basics of the problem – a problem the Stargates have solved, in a way.
“It’s mostly a matter of finding wormholes existing independently in space,” Rodney says from the doorway. He’s hunched there, hands in his pockets like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t, embarrassed, an emotion which to Rodney is both unfamiliar and unwelcome. “We – well, they – haven’t figured out if quantum gravity would allow for them. Classical relativity does, but it doesn’t take quantum mechanics into account, which is the problem.”
“Oh.” John nods very carefully, his I don’t get it and I’m deliberately tormenting you with my stupidity nod.
“Different types of wormholes have been postulated.” Rodney inches more fully into the kitchen, apparently having decided this is a safe topic, “but none have actually been observed, um, in the wild, so to speak. That sounds kind of like a really bad science fiction movie... Wormholes in Space… Anyway, we never found any in Pegasus, but to be fair, we had the Stargates so we weren’t exactly looking.”
John sets the offprint down on the counter, watches as Rodney’s eyes track toward it.
“That’s kind of old, actually.” Hesitant fingers touch a corner of the paper. “It’s the last one I published, back when we were still in regular contact with Earth. And I had to get it vetted by Carter, of all people.” His mouth lengthens in irritation. “She wasn’t on the journal’s peer review committee – she was the censor, making sure I wasn’t dropping any classified secrets or, you know, publishing something that’ll win me the Nobel instead of her. It’s like putting a lion in charge of quality control at a meat packing factory.”
Rodney lets the tirade drop in favor of pulling up a stool next to John. He’s close enough that John can smell faint sweat from moving stuff, coffee, the leather from Rodney’s couch.
Comforting.
“So, Princeton?” John asks, like picking at a scab he knows is going to break open and start bleeding again.
Tense go the shoulders, but Rodney doesn’t run.
“I’m taking a sabbatical,” he says.
“Some sabbatical.” John looks around Rodney’s house, still in the chaos of being halfway moved in and halfway moved out – some pictures still need to be hung, cardboard boxes put away. John hates cardboard boxes, the smell and feel of them, the memories of too many moves and too few choices. Computers still packed up, not a whisper of technology anywhere other than the TV and DVD player.
“Yeah, well…” Rodney stares at John a moment, eyes wide and piercing and blue. “I, um… I need to think about things. Surprise.” His tone invites John to laugh along, which John does, a brief heh heh and headshake, because even fake laughter is so much better than actually talking. “But it’s… We aren’t in the Stargate program anymore, John.”
Hey John, come on, wake up, and Rodney never calls him John. Never has.
“You should get a forwarding order for your mail,” Rodney says, out of nowhere. “If you haven’t.”
“Okay,” John says, still thinking John, John, John.
He probably shouldn’t stay, is the problem, for a whole legion, whole Hive ships of reasons. Heightmeyer would be all over the two of them, going on and on about codependency and needing to have Closure (and John knows there’s no such thing, but it’s a nice story), and how they’ll have to move on, away from each other, from Colorado, from Atlantis and it only hurts, holding on to what’s already slipped through your fingers.
“I’m going to bed,” Rodney says, random and welcome, breaking the moment. But he glances at John, like seeking permission or checking if he’s okay, and the sadness is back. “’Night.”
“Yeah,” John says, and gestures to the kitchen and its half-scrubbed countertop. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
A minute stretches to two hours, both of them spent bizarrely and acutely aware of Rodney sleeping upstairs. Overnight missions, no matter how bad the ground, Rodney could sleep on it (though the bitching in the morning, oh God, the bitching), and still managing to be intent even in unconsciousness, solving his way through dreams.
Definitely codependency, John decides. Heightmeyer would disapprove.
* * *
The next day Rodney finishes unpacking his CDs and DVDs. A lot of science fiction in the latter, which is no surprise – though the fact that Rodney bitches and insults the moves speaks to his twisted conception of what constitutes entertainment – and, what does surprise John is classical in the former. Rachmaninoff, Bach – a lot of Bach – Mozart, Saint-Saëns, composers John’s never heard of.
While they eat Thai on the couch with Planck purring between them, Rodney puts on some music. In the brief hiatus of silence before the CD starts, John expects piano or violin, but then it’s the soft sound of a dulcimer, or something close to it, but no earthly instrument. A man’s voice joins it, deep and smooth, the words alien but familiar, impressed into John’s bones as though they’ve been there all along and needed only the man’s voice to draw them out.
It’s Athosian, a prayer to the Ancestors for something John can’t understand. The Athosians are big on prayers and lament, John remembers, not many happy songs other than wedding songs and something they sing after hunts. After a few measures a woman’s voice joins the dulcimer. Not Teyla’s, not a voice John can remember hearing, rich and slow, deeper than Teyla’s voice had been.
“I, um, got it from one of the anthropologists – I did the encryption for her. Don’t tell anyone,” Rodney says, voice little more than a soft rumble under the woman’s voice, which slides along the notes like dark honey. “I would hate to drag you to an SGC holding cell with me.”
John doesn’t say anything, just sits there with Rodney and listens.
* * *
The Princeton offer stays on the coffee table, stuck to it by a clot of pizza sauce and Rodney’s refusal to remove it. John sees it every time he walks between the study and the kitchen with rollers and drop-cloths (invalid or not, Rodney’s made it clear he’s going to assist with the whole painting the office project), every time they sit down to eat or watch TV. His fingers itch to pull it off and burn it, or else maybe shove it in Rodney’s face and demand he call the committee and say yeah, I’ll take it.
Other stuff on the coffee table comes and goes: house keys – John has his own set now – glasses and Styrofoam boxes, Planck the cat who treats every surface as part of his territory and knocks off the accretions of random papers.
Two days after its arrival, despite Planck’s interference, the letter is still there, and John asks about it. It’s this fucking compulsion, something out of a Poe short story, someone being driven insane by a letter stuck to a table with a bit of pizza sauce. Like a Poe story, it might even involve a gruesome murder.
Why aren’t you going? he tries to ask. It’s a great opportunity, is what he means to say, but it comes out more like Why the hell aren’t you going? Seriously, why the hell aren’t you going and of course Rodney’s hackles go up – which John realizes was stupid not to expect – and he demands to know why the hell John’s asking, and doesn’t he have a vested interest in Rodney staying?
Rodney’s nerves always ride close to the surface, but they’re raw now, exposed, too much like John’s own.
“Besides, I’m on sabbatical,” Rodney says again, leaning heavily on sabbatical, enunciating each syllable with an emphasis designed to pound it into John’s skull. They’re not even pretending to try to move the bookcases now; they’re standing on opposite ends of one, surrounded by paint cans and rollers and old sheets that tangle around their feet, glaring at each other, and Rodney’s face is like Arcturus all over again – that kind of loss.
“You’re mooching off me,” Rodney points out, clutching a paint brush, mouth a razor slash of fury across his face. “Besides, it’s not like you’re out there begging for work or something.”
“If you want me to,” John says, even as he thinks I’ll regret this, “I’ll leave.”
Something raw now in Rodney’s eyes, confusion again and John’s never really realized how vulnerable that can make Rodney, all that fire going out and sadness left like ashes on Rodney’s face.
Rodney’s just as lost as he is, and that... John shies away from the thought, because if he can’t save them, then it’s all on McKay and vice versa. He should apologize, and it’s half on his tongue – Shit, Rodney, I’m sorry, okay?, though what he’d be apologizing for he has no idea.
Besides, they never apologize to each other, because they never fight.
Which, if he thinks about it, is probably a big damn lie – is a big damn lie, seeing as how Rodney’s staring at him, silent but rapidly recovering himself – but he’s not going to think about that right now. Or ever.
So he doesn’t apologize, just shrugs and says something about needing to pick up some more rollers because Rodney had picked up the wrong kind.
“Fine,” Rodney snaps, shaking himself out of it. “Get some more coffee, too; we’re almost out.”
John stalks out of the study – where they’d been having their not-fight, waving paintbrushes around and splattering the walls and ancient bookcases with blue – and leaves the house, heads out into the ferocious glare of a summer afternoon and heads for nowhere in particular. The car’s engine whines in protest as he steps hard on the gas pedal and peels out of the neighborhood at a reckless thirty-five miles an hour.
In the movies, it’s a high-speed drive off into some horizon – into a desert sunset, down a highway empty of traffic. And the hero drives a convertible, something fast and flashy, and definitely not a rented Toyota that gets lost in the anonymity of suburban traffic.
“Dammit.” He hates how tiny and useless the sound is, swallowed up by the air conditioner and the sprawl of the city around him. “Dammit,” he tries again, and it doesn’t sound any better.
Targ-Mart doesn’t help his mood, the fucking everydayness of it all, tracking down the right roller for the wall texture, remembering Rodney’s coffee – which he has to get from an import shop down the road, and which requires not so much a five-minute drive as a fucking expedition, and he wishes he had Elizabeth to negotiate with the natives –
and here he goes again, with Atlantis and the way things had been and were supposed to be, the one thing that had let him think that his life had some kind of direction outside the sir, yes, sir of the Air Force. In odd minutes in the city, in a puddle jumper when he wasn’t busy running for his life or someone else’s, he’d thought that maybe there was something to this destiny business after all, and stupid him, he’d let himself believe it, and then had it taken away.
Which just… it pisses him off, that, and not being able to do anything about it.
So he pretends: pays for coffee and flirts with the cashier, who compliments on him on his taste and John doesn’t really know why he says It’s for a friend, because he’s supposed to be angry with Rodney for not accepting, or accepting, the offer to move on, to break orbit.
“You don’t happen to know where the mall is, do you?” a passing woman asks as he fumbles for his keys on his way to the parking lot. She’s not even really a woman, a girl more like, though the look she gives him has flirtation laced through her squint-eyed concern.
He shrugs and offers her the grin that says a whole lot and promises nothing, the one he’s good at, even as he says Sorry, I don’t, just visiting and climbs back into his car.
* * *
.>.
Later that day, they end up going to a Super Colossal Targ-Mart or Wal-Get or something like that – something obscenely outsized and guaranteed to be a madhouse on Saturday afternoon – because Rodney’s decided to repaint his office. Yeah, that office, the office he just finished setting up today, in the house that had been renovated before Rodney’d bought it.
“Off-white is the most ridiculous color in the world,” Rodney says for the fifteenth time, though the last time John had pointed out that Rodney’ll have to move everything was about ten minutes ago. “And seriously, that room looks like it hosted an Incontinence Day Celebration.”
“It does,” John agrees. The office had been a playroom in a former incarnation, painted eggshell-white with pale yellow sun-shaped stencils.
“And you’ll have to help me with everything, especially the bookcases,” Rodney adds. “The movers took care of it all last time, and there’s no possible way I can move those bookcases by myself.” He slams the car door shut to emphasize this.
Privately John thinks there’s no way the two of them could move those bookcases, four solid oak monstrosities that Rodney’s had since graduate school. They could probably inch them away from the wall and try to paint behind them, but anything else was probably begging for a hernia, and the both of them being sidelined on Rodney’s couch.
He says this, and Rodney self-consciously runs one hand through his hair, as though checking to be sure it’s all there, and in doing so making it stand up even more. It’s a bit lighter now, though six months can’t be long enough for it to thin out more than when John had seen Rodney last, in a debriefing room at SGC.
The walk across the parking lot seems as long as some of their off-world hikes, complete with unexpected dangers – homicidal natives in SUVs, shopping carts running wild, bored vacationing teenagers loitering by their cars and eyeing Rodney with interest and disdain (and Rodney, John knows, could destroy them, just thinking about it), a jerk in a Corvette too busy with his cell phone to watch where he’s going.
“Asshole,” Rodney mutters passionately, glaring at the back of the driver’s head. “I wish I had a P90.” He slants a speculative look at John. “You carrying?”
“Left it in my other pants.”
“Crap.”
Rodney stalks along just behind John’s left shoulder between eight and nine o’clock. Like how they used to walk, John on point, and it’s easy to feel Teyla at his six, Ronon – or maybe Ford – checking their backtrail, to hear the endless stream of geek-jabber and complaints from Rodney, but mostly just feeling him there, fitting into the Rodney-shaped place in John’s awareness.
Teyla and Ronon, back in Pegasus, and no way was John ever going to find out what had happened or will happen to them. Ford, Grodin, Stackhouse, Markham, too many other Marines, Athosians, all of them over there forever, and it should freak him out that he’s jealous of them, but it doesn’t.
You aren’t allowed to obsess about this, he tells himself, hating the way his thoughts have been slanting off ever since he got here a week ago. Not that he’s been doing a great job of keeping them on track since he’d left the Air Force, but there you go.
Worse around Rodney, like putting lemon juice and salt in the wound, just for the tingle of that feels kind of good after the screaming fuckfuckfuckHURT fades a bit.
They make it inside and Rodney beelines for the coffee shop. There’s coffee shop in this thing, Starbucks even, John thinks dazedly as he orders coffee he really doesn’t need, equipped with enough espresso drinks to supply Rodney for ten safaris through the store.
“I need coffee to deal with this.” Rodney’s chin indicates the Saturday afternoon insanity of American consumerism. “Seriously, this was probably a mistake.”
Mistake or not, Rodney and his espresso-fueled self take no prisoners as he grabs a shopping cart and plows through the aisles, and in Rodney’s hands the cart becomes a battering ram and bumper car. John can’t help grinning because it’s so familiar, better almost than Rodney’s running commentary on the evils of American capitalism and the average intelligence (or lack thereof) of the human locusts currently infesting the store.
For his part, John gives up apologizing and follows Rodney around, tossing random items into the cart and trying not to feel like a huge, stumbling freak. He’d spent the better part of his six months of downtime on base, foraging for food at the BX before his papers had gone through, and that hadn’t prepared him for shopping as full-contact sport.
It hadn’t prepared him for a lot of things, being a civilian again, for being here on a summer afternoon and helping Rodney mow down helpless old women and small armies of five-year-olds. He tries to smile apologetically and gives up on that too, wondering if people think he’s as weird, as out of place, as he feels.
“You made that kid cry,” John points out as they finally – finally – make it to the housewares and hardware section. “And I think those two women from back in the produce aisle are following us.”
Rodney glances over his shoulder. “They’re probably stalking you. Honestly, how did you manage to age so well? It’s not fair to the rest of us.” He blinks, turns bright red, and begins to study the selection of paint.
He ends up choosing blue.
It probably has a more complicated name, like “Dusty Cobalt” or “Mystic Ocean,” but it’s a deep, matte blue, Lantean-sky blue, when all the moons are out and it isn’t quite full night yet.
“We don’t need to rush this,” Rodney’s saying as he unpacks the paint, drop cloths, and rollers. “It’s better to go slow and do well than hurry things.”
“This from the man who wants everything done yesterday? That’s pretty rich.” John’s sacked out on the couch, watching Rodney fuss over plastic bags and the mail.
“Yeah, well, you still have a concussion,” Rodney says, leaning so heavily on concussion John wonders if the word will snap. He straightens, hitching at khakis that barely – barely – cover the strip of blue boxer shorts. “You probably shouldn’t think about inhaling paint fumes right now.” Pause, and Rodney’s looking at him now, smirking, and hey, that’s John’s smirk. His, and Rodney never asked permission to borrow it. “Besides, this involves step ladders, and your track record with them isn’t exactly stellar.”
“Fuck you, McKay.”
“You’re just saying that because you know I’m right.”
That’s pretty much true, and John really can’t say anything to that.
Rodney abandons the equipment in the study in favor of wandering back out into the living room to collapse onto the couch and look over the mail. John quickly retracts his feet before they get crushed. Typical, of course, that Rodney doesn’t even apologize – or notice – too busy sifting through the stack of envelopes with impatient speed.
“Anything good?”
“Just crap.” Rodney tosses the pile of envelopes onto the coffee table. “Speaking of which, did you need to go back to your place or something? You know, to pick up your mail and stuff?”
You know, your life? The one they say you’re supposed to have?
“Nah.” He pays all his bills online, and unless it’s a letter saying the SGC has reinstated the Atlantis expedition, he’s not interested in hearing about it.
“Oh.” Rodney sounds sort of pleased by that, but when John looks up to double-check, Rodney’s staring fixedly at the small pile of envelopes again, flicking through them with the devotion he usually reserves for solving the equations that stand between them and certain death. “Junk… junk… electric bill… junk…”
John snags the last one.
“Princeton?” he asks, examining the return address. “Doesn’t look like junk to me.”
“It’s probably from the alumni association,” Rodney sniffs. “Vampires.”
“You never went to Princeton,” John tells him. He knows this because he can remember every single one of the degrees Rodney had posted on the wall of his quarters. He hasn’t seen those degrees since they’d packed the last time, but he remembers. The only thing from the Wall of Fame that Rodney’s put up again is his autographed photo of Earth that had been taken on a Discovery space walk.
Rodney had designed an improved solar panel for a satellite, and the crew had installed it on that spacewalk. John knows all about it, because Rodney can recite the story like reciting the Iliad.
“Then it’s probably from someone I know there.”
“Like who?”
“Who cares? Give it back.”
Rodney reaches for the envelope, but John’s quick on the evasion, twisting around on the couch and fending off Rodney with both feet and one hand while mangling the envelope open with the other hand and his teeth. He wants to laugh, because dammit, it’s five years old and stupid and fun, and because anger has Rodney’s face twisted up in all sorts of knots, blue eyes snapping with it.
“Sheppard!” Rodney squawks. “John, dammit! That’s a felony, tampering with someone else’s mail! Give it!”
“This’ll be good,” John says, loud enough to provoke another indignant sound from Rodney, who’s pressing against John’s feet and forcing his knees toward his chest. “C’mon, McKay, what’s the big deal? They’re just asking for money.”
“Asshole.” Rodney slumps back, rubbing at his stomach. “Will you give me my letter back, please? Now that you’ve probably caused an ulcer to rupture or whatever.”
“Now?” John stares at him. “No way.”
Over Rodney’s protests and despite one more desperate flail at the envelope, he pulls out a piece of paper, Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies letterhead, and reads.
“Shit. Fuck. Rodney, they’re offering you a fellowship. A pure research fellowship.” He’s not an academic, but he’s spent enough time on the geek side of the Force to know what that means: no teaching, just… well, pure research. Rodney’s dream job, if you took Atlantis out of the picture.
“I know,” Rodney says quietly, looking anywhere but at John and the piece of paper in his hand.
“You know?” John stares at him, and left field definitely applies here – curve ball, fall off a step ladder, any unexpected event that ends in pain and consternation.
“Radek called me just after I moved here.” Rodney sort of curls in on himself, hunching up like he does when he’s too upset to be pissed off. “He’s doing research at Cornell now, and knows someone on the Institute fellowship committee. He, um, found out before they made the final selections.”
“Rodney, this is really cool.” Except it isn’t, really, and John doesn’t even want to think about why, that it has to do with staying and the look on Rodney’s face last night, and things not changing any more than they already had. “You going to take it?”
“No, I’m not.”
And Rodney says it like that’s that, thank you drive through, and hauls himself up and vanishes into the kitchen.
They’re not going to talk about this, John knows, though Rodney’s unhappiness shouts itself hoarse from two rooms away, and continues to shout for the rest of the afternoon while John pretends to sleep and read Anna Karenina.
Not like he ever finished War and Peace, but whatever.
Rodney offers détente by letting John pick out dinner again, and John picks an Indian place he knows Rodney likes because they don’t go overboard with the spices and the rice is free.
While cleaning up after dinner – which mostly means stuffing things in the dishwasher and putting the take-out stuff back in the drawer, John finds a crumpled wad of paper buried among the pizza menus and pulls it out.
“Spatial Topography, Wormholes, and the Problem of Quantum Gravity,” by R. McKay.
He settles in at the counter to read, absently pulling up a bar stool, sponge forgotten on the sideboard.
It’s oddly like reading Rodney’s diary, seeing this other part of his friend, the part that speaks in measured sentences, precise, no flashy gestures, the side that wins fellowships and awards, the smart without the hysteria. Yet it’s also so much Rodney: logic, inexorable logic, and everything’s so clear, you Sheppards, you lesser scientists, if you would only look and really see.
He doesn’t understand much of what Rodney’s saying, the equations like a foreign language he can barely remember speaking – high-school Spanish, the smattering of local dialects from Afghanistan – but it’s elegant, clean-lined even with Rodney’s illegible, half-smeared scribbles in the margins and the occasional smudges of ink.
And he remembers this vaguely, remembers Rodney stomping into his room in the hospital, spitting indignation and worry and gripping a small sheaf of papers. He’d dropped them and his house keys on the bed, and had stared at John like he’d been the Problem of Quantum Gravity.
… and I wouldn’t want your death to get in the way of you staying at my place for a bit longer, Rodney had said, and there’d been something there like discovery, faint wonderment hidden just under Rodney’s annoyance, something that warms John and dizzies and discomfits him at the same time.
The look Rodney’d had last night, waking John up, unguarded and thinking maybe John was too out of it to recognize that look.
Dizziness turns to a quick shiver, something incongruous and warm lighting up in some indefinable place somewhere inside him. Contentment, sitting here, anticipation, thinking about that expression on Rodney’s face, confusion and not minding it, weird alchemy he can’t parse out.
He reads a bit more, mostly because it’s something Rodney’s written and not because he understands any of it, though he can grasp the basics of the problem – a problem the Stargates have solved, in a way.
“It’s mostly a matter of finding wormholes existing independently in space,” Rodney says from the doorway. He’s hunched there, hands in his pockets like he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t, embarrassed, an emotion which to Rodney is both unfamiliar and unwelcome. “We – well, they – haven’t figured out if quantum gravity would allow for them. Classical relativity does, but it doesn’t take quantum mechanics into account, which is the problem.”
“Oh.” John nods very carefully, his I don’t get it and I’m deliberately tormenting you with my stupidity nod.
“Different types of wormholes have been postulated.” Rodney inches more fully into the kitchen, apparently having decided this is a safe topic, “but none have actually been observed, um, in the wild, so to speak. That sounds kind of like a really bad science fiction movie... Wormholes in Space… Anyway, we never found any in Pegasus, but to be fair, we had the Stargates so we weren’t exactly looking.”
John sets the offprint down on the counter, watches as Rodney’s eyes track toward it.
“That’s kind of old, actually.” Hesitant fingers touch a corner of the paper. “It’s the last one I published, back when we were still in regular contact with Earth. And I had to get it vetted by Carter, of all people.” His mouth lengthens in irritation. “She wasn’t on the journal’s peer review committee – she was the censor, making sure I wasn’t dropping any classified secrets or, you know, publishing something that’ll win me the Nobel instead of her. It’s like putting a lion in charge of quality control at a meat packing factory.”
Rodney lets the tirade drop in favor of pulling up a stool next to John. He’s close enough that John can smell faint sweat from moving stuff, coffee, the leather from Rodney’s couch.
Comforting.
“So, Princeton?” John asks, like picking at a scab he knows is going to break open and start bleeding again.
Tense go the shoulders, but Rodney doesn’t run.
“I’m taking a sabbatical,” he says.
“Some sabbatical.” John looks around Rodney’s house, still in the chaos of being halfway moved in and halfway moved out – some pictures still need to be hung, cardboard boxes put away. John hates cardboard boxes, the smell and feel of them, the memories of too many moves and too few choices. Computers still packed up, not a whisper of technology anywhere other than the TV and DVD player.
“Yeah, well…” Rodney stares at John a moment, eyes wide and piercing and blue. “I, um… I need to think about things. Surprise.” His tone invites John to laugh along, which John does, a brief heh heh and headshake, because even fake laughter is so much better than actually talking. “But it’s… We aren’t in the Stargate program anymore, John.”
Hey John, come on, wake up, and Rodney never calls him John. Never has.
“You should get a forwarding order for your mail,” Rodney says, out of nowhere. “If you haven’t.”
“Okay,” John says, still thinking John, John, John.
He probably shouldn’t stay, is the problem, for a whole legion, whole Hive ships of reasons. Heightmeyer would be all over the two of them, going on and on about codependency and needing to have Closure (and John knows there’s no such thing, but it’s a nice story), and how they’ll have to move on, away from each other, from Colorado, from Atlantis and it only hurts, holding on to what’s already slipped through your fingers.
“I’m going to bed,” Rodney says, random and welcome, breaking the moment. But he glances at John, like seeking permission or checking if he’s okay, and the sadness is back. “’Night.”
“Yeah,” John says, and gestures to the kitchen and its half-scrubbed countertop. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
A minute stretches to two hours, both of them spent bizarrely and acutely aware of Rodney sleeping upstairs. Overnight missions, no matter how bad the ground, Rodney could sleep on it (though the bitching in the morning, oh God, the bitching), and still managing to be intent even in unconsciousness, solving his way through dreams.
Definitely codependency, John decides. Heightmeyer would disapprove.
The next day Rodney finishes unpacking his CDs and DVDs. A lot of science fiction in the latter, which is no surprise – though the fact that Rodney bitches and insults the moves speaks to his twisted conception of what constitutes entertainment – and, what does surprise John is classical in the former. Rachmaninoff, Bach – a lot of Bach – Mozart, Saint-Saëns, composers John’s never heard of.
While they eat Thai on the couch with Planck purring between them, Rodney puts on some music. In the brief hiatus of silence before the CD starts, John expects piano or violin, but then it’s the soft sound of a dulcimer, or something close to it, but no earthly instrument. A man’s voice joins it, deep and smooth, the words alien but familiar, impressed into John’s bones as though they’ve been there all along and needed only the man’s voice to draw them out.
It’s Athosian, a prayer to the Ancestors for something John can’t understand. The Athosians are big on prayers and lament, John remembers, not many happy songs other than wedding songs and something they sing after hunts. After a few measures a woman’s voice joins the dulcimer. Not Teyla’s, not a voice John can remember hearing, rich and slow, deeper than Teyla’s voice had been.
“I, um, got it from one of the anthropologists – I did the encryption for her. Don’t tell anyone,” Rodney says, voice little more than a soft rumble under the woman’s voice, which slides along the notes like dark honey. “I would hate to drag you to an SGC holding cell with me.”
John doesn’t say anything, just sits there with Rodney and listens.
The Princeton offer stays on the coffee table, stuck to it by a clot of pizza sauce and Rodney’s refusal to remove it. John sees it every time he walks between the study and the kitchen with rollers and drop-cloths (invalid or not, Rodney’s made it clear he’s going to assist with the whole painting the office project), every time they sit down to eat or watch TV. His fingers itch to pull it off and burn it, or else maybe shove it in Rodney’s face and demand he call the committee and say yeah, I’ll take it.
Other stuff on the coffee table comes and goes: house keys – John has his own set now – glasses and Styrofoam boxes, Planck the cat who treats every surface as part of his territory and knocks off the accretions of random papers.
Two days after its arrival, despite Planck’s interference, the letter is still there, and John asks about it. It’s this fucking compulsion, something out of a Poe short story, someone being driven insane by a letter stuck to a table with a bit of pizza sauce. Like a Poe story, it might even involve a gruesome murder.
Why aren’t you going? he tries to ask. It’s a great opportunity, is what he means to say, but it comes out more like Why the hell aren’t you going? Seriously, why the hell aren’t you going and of course Rodney’s hackles go up – which John realizes was stupid not to expect – and he demands to know why the hell John’s asking, and doesn’t he have a vested interest in Rodney staying?
Rodney’s nerves always ride close to the surface, but they’re raw now, exposed, too much like John’s own.
“Besides, I’m on sabbatical,” Rodney says again, leaning heavily on sabbatical, enunciating each syllable with an emphasis designed to pound it into John’s skull. They’re not even pretending to try to move the bookcases now; they’re standing on opposite ends of one, surrounded by paint cans and rollers and old sheets that tangle around their feet, glaring at each other, and Rodney’s face is like Arcturus all over again – that kind of loss.
“You’re mooching off me,” Rodney points out, clutching a paint brush, mouth a razor slash of fury across his face. “Besides, it’s not like you’re out there begging for work or something.”
“If you want me to,” John says, even as he thinks I’ll regret this, “I’ll leave.”
Something raw now in Rodney’s eyes, confusion again and John’s never really realized how vulnerable that can make Rodney, all that fire going out and sadness left like ashes on Rodney’s face.
Rodney’s just as lost as he is, and that... John shies away from the thought, because if he can’t save them, then it’s all on McKay and vice versa. He should apologize, and it’s half on his tongue – Shit, Rodney, I’m sorry, okay?, though what he’d be apologizing for he has no idea.
Besides, they never apologize to each other, because they never fight.
Which, if he thinks about it, is probably a big damn lie – is a big damn lie, seeing as how Rodney’s staring at him, silent but rapidly recovering himself – but he’s not going to think about that right now. Or ever.
So he doesn’t apologize, just shrugs and says something about needing to pick up some more rollers because Rodney had picked up the wrong kind.
“Fine,” Rodney snaps, shaking himself out of it. “Get some more coffee, too; we’re almost out.”
John stalks out of the study – where they’d been having their not-fight, waving paintbrushes around and splattering the walls and ancient bookcases with blue – and leaves the house, heads out into the ferocious glare of a summer afternoon and heads for nowhere in particular. The car’s engine whines in protest as he steps hard on the gas pedal and peels out of the neighborhood at a reckless thirty-five miles an hour.
In the movies, it’s a high-speed drive off into some horizon – into a desert sunset, down a highway empty of traffic. And the hero drives a convertible, something fast and flashy, and definitely not a rented Toyota that gets lost in the anonymity of suburban traffic.
“Dammit.” He hates how tiny and useless the sound is, swallowed up by the air conditioner and the sprawl of the city around him. “Dammit,” he tries again, and it doesn’t sound any better.
Targ-Mart doesn’t help his mood, the fucking everydayness of it all, tracking down the right roller for the wall texture, remembering Rodney’s coffee – which he has to get from an import shop down the road, and which requires not so much a five-minute drive as a fucking expedition, and he wishes he had Elizabeth to negotiate with the natives –
and here he goes again, with Atlantis and the way things had been and were supposed to be, the one thing that had let him think that his life had some kind of direction outside the sir, yes, sir of the Air Force. In odd minutes in the city, in a puddle jumper when he wasn’t busy running for his life or someone else’s, he’d thought that maybe there was something to this destiny business after all, and stupid him, he’d let himself believe it, and then had it taken away.
Which just… it pisses him off, that, and not being able to do anything about it.
So he pretends: pays for coffee and flirts with the cashier, who compliments on him on his taste and John doesn’t really know why he says It’s for a friend, because he’s supposed to be angry with Rodney for not accepting, or accepting, the offer to move on, to break orbit.
“You don’t happen to know where the mall is, do you?” a passing woman asks as he fumbles for his keys on his way to the parking lot. She’s not even really a woman, a girl more like, though the look she gives him has flirtation laced through her squint-eyed concern.
He shrugs and offers her the grin that says a whole lot and promises nothing, the one he’s good at, even as he says Sorry, I don’t, just visiting and climbs back into his car.
.>.